Skip to main content
Main

Lyonnaise Potatoes

Lyonnaise potatoes are boiled potatoes sautéed with onion, butter, parsley, salt, pepper, and optional lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Lyonnaise Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Fry the chopped onion in butter until light brown.

  2. Add the potatoes and season with salt and pepper.

  3. Toss lightly with a fork until heated through.

  4. Stir in the chopped parsley and cook for a moment.

  5. Serve hot, adding lemon juice if desired.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Potato + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,855 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Form the bulk of the dish and absorb butter, becoming tender and lightly crisp when fried.
Butter
Fat that carries flavor, browns the onion and helps the potatoes crisp in the pan.
Onion
Softens and browns in butter, adding sweetness and savory depth to the potatoes.
Parsley
Adds fresh, green aroma and a light herbal flavor at the end of cooking.

The step that matters

Toss lightly with a fork until heated through. Tossing gently rather than stirring hard keeps the potato pieces intact and lets some surfaces brown and crisp instead of mashing into the butter.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, onion, butter, pepper, parsley):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Avocadofits less well
  4. Mangofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, onion, butter, pepper, parsley. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Potato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipesPotato ChipsPotato Chips53 recipes