Home › Vegetables › Lima Beans
Lima Beans
Boil the beans until tender, then season with butter, pepper, salt and cream.
A two-line recipe that assumes the cook already knows what kind of bean is meant and how long it wants. The main decision the original leaves unmade is fresh versus dried.
- Which beanOn a vegetable page of this period "Lima beans" most likely means fresh shelled limas in season, though the recipe gives no indication either way; the name butter bean was also used for limas, with the sense varying by region. Fresh or frozen limas need 15-25 minutes at a bare simmer, dried limas need an overnight soak and 45-90 minutes.
- Salt timingSalt at the end, as written. Cooks have long held that salted water firms bean skins and lengthens the cooking, though this is disputed; in any case the recipe lists the seasoning after the boiling.
- Simmer, do not boil hardA rolling boil splits the skins and the beans go to mush at the edges while the centres are still chalky. Keep the water barely moving and the beans covered.
- "Cream"Period cream was not standardised and varied in richness depending on how it was separated; today's light cream or half-and-half is a reasonable stand-in. Two or three tablespoons for a pound of beans, added off the heat with the butter, gives a loose coating rather than a sauce.
- Drain wellLimas hold cooking water in their hollows. Drain and let them steam dry in the pan for a minute before the butter and cream go in, or the seasoning slides off into a puddle.
- YieldA pound of shelled fresh limas, or half a pound dried, serves four as a side dish.
Lima beans are a New World crop, domesticated in the Andes and in Mesoamerica long before contact, and the name is generally traced to the port of Lima, from which the seed was shipped north in the colonial period. By the turn of the twentieth century they were a standard American summer vegetable, sold in the pod at market and shelled at home, which is why a book like this can dispose of them in one sentence: the reader knew the work and only needed the seasoning. What remains is the butter-pepper-salt-and-cream finish.