A straw cake from Lyon is one of the wonderful forms of brown, crisp potato with tender insides. It’s made of just little sticks or shreds of potato cooked slowly in a frying pan in a lot of butter. The name is pommes paillasson in French, a paillasson being a straw mat. Pommes Anna are related, but the cakes is thicker and made neatly arranged thin rounds; it’s more about appearance and it’s baked, under a cover, using even more butter. Pommes paillasson go with roasted or grilled meats, and although additions aren’t common, the Lyonnais chef Alain Chapel in the 1970s topped the cake with fines herbes — chervil and parsley mixed with some chives and a little tarragon — which gives a completely different effect, a lightness. Even just chervil is transforming (it’s one of the few herbs on my windowsill at the moment). With the herbs, a paillasson can be a course on its own.
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