Pommes de Terre à la Lyonnaise

Pommes de Terre à la Lyonnaise (Lyon-style potatoes) teaches one true thing: ingredients that finish at different speeds must earn their colour separately. Brown the onions beside the potatoes, not on top of them; marry the two only when each is ready, and you get golden rounds threaded with sweet onion rather than a pale heap with broken edges.

The classical entry assumed peeled, plain-boiled potatoes were already waiting in the brigade, two sauté pans could move at once, and a timbale stood ready for service. It called for no saucier, perpetual stock, or salamander, and neither do you. For one cook, one stove, one evening, boil and cool 680 grams of potatoes, keep the book's onion proportion at exactly one quarter by weight, use two ordinary skillets, and serve from a warm household dish. Having the potatoes ready and presenting them in a timbale were service scaffolding; the separate butter sauté is the dish, and it stays.

Cool the potatoes before you slice them. That is the step that matters most: warm potato rounds smear and fracture in the pan, while cool ones take a butter-gold face and remain themselves.