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Sweet Potatoes, Lyonnaise
Boil four good-sized potatoes in a quart water with half teaspoon salt for forty minutes; drain, peel and slice them. Heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter in a frying pan, add one finely sliced onion and brown for five minutes, then add the potatoes. Season with a quarter teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper; toss them well once in a while, cooking for five minutes, give a nice omelette form, brown for five minutes longer and serve.
A straightforward pan-fry that hinges on two things the original gets wrong for modern sweet potatoes: the boiling time and the amount of fat.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two of them is half a teaspoon of white pepper. That is aggressive against sweet potato; a quarter teaspoon is closer to modern taste.
- Boiling timeForty minutes will leave most sweet potatoes collapsing, and slices that fall apart in the pan. Boil whole and unpeeled until a knife meets slight resistance at the centre, usually 20 to 25 minutes, then cool a few minutes before peeling and slicing thickly.
- A quart of waterDepending on the pot, that may not be enough to cover four good-sized potatoes. Use whatever depth covers them; the salt does little at this stage since the skins are on.
- ButterA tablespoon and a half will not carry four potatoes plus an onion in a modern pan. Three tablespoons, or butter with a spoonful of neutral oil to raise the smoke point, gives you the browning the recipe asks for.
- HeatSweet potatoes have far more sugar than the white potatoes usually treated lyonnaise, and they scorch where white potatoes would merely colour. Keep the pan at medium and judge by the crust rather than the clock.
- "A nice omelette form"Most likely means gathering the mixture into an even oval or cake shape in the pan, as an omelette is shaped, so the underside sets into a single browned sheet; slide or invert it onto the plate rather than spooning it out.
- YieldNot stated; four good-sized potatoes would serve about four as a side dish.
À la lyonnaise means, in practice, with onions; the style is named for Lyon, a city traditionally associated with onion cookery, potatoes lyonnaise being the best-known dish of the family. Substituting sweet potatoes for the usual white ones applies a French method to an ingredient that was cheap and thoroughly domestic in America. The measuring in saltspoons rather than fractions of a teaspoon is a period habit; the saltspoon was a real object on a well-set table, a tiny shovel that sat in the open salt dish.