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Succotash (Take one dozen ears of sweet)
Take one dozen ears of sweet corn; cut off the kernels; boil the cobs in about three pints of water. Wash a quart of Lima beans and put in water with the cobs. Scald one pound of salt pork and add to the beans and cobs; boil all together very nearly one hour; remove the cobs and add the kernels of corn. Let corn, beans and pork boil welı fifteen or twenty minutes; when done, there should be only water enough to keep them from burning in the pot. Serve the pork on a flat, and the succotash in a covered dish.
A full-sized, old-style succotash built on a cob broth and a piece of salt pork — closer to a boiled dinner than the buttered side dish the name now suggests. A few notes on quantities and salt.
- Salt pork, scalded"Scald" here means to cover with boiling water and drain, which draws off surface brine and some of the harshness. Modern salt pork is still heavily cured; taste the broth before adding any salt at all, and if the pork is very salty, blanch it a second time.
- Which Lima beansA quart of shelled fresh Limas is a good deal of beans — several pounds in the pod — or roughly 1.5 lb frozen. Dried Limas are a different ingredient and would need soaking; the near-hour of boiling here suits fresh or frozen beans, which will be soft well before the pork is.
- The cob broth is the pointSimmering the stripped cobs in the water gives the dish its sweetness and body. Do not skip it, and do not discard that liquid — the finished dish should be barely moist, so all of the flavour ends up in the beans.
- Corn goes in lastFifteen to twenty minutes is long by current taste; modern supersweet corn is tender in five. Add the kernels near the end, cook only until set, and let the beans and pork have the long boil to themselves.
- "Very nearly one hour"Judge by the pork rather than the clock. A one-pound piece needs 45–60 minutes of gentle boiling to slice cleanly; fresh Limas will be done sooner, so keep the heat low enough that they do not break up.
- Serve the pork on a flatA 'flat' here is a flat serving dish or platter. The pork is lifted out, sliced, and served separately, with the succotash in a covered dish beside it.
- YieldA dozen ears and a quart of beans feeds eight to ten as a vegetable, more if the pork is counted as the meat of the meal. Leftovers reheat well with a splash of water.
Succotash comes from the Narragansett msickquatash, meaning boiled corn kernels, and the dish is one of the clearest survivals of Native American cooking in the Anglo-American kitchen: corn and beans grown together in the field and cooked together in the pot. New England versions of the nineteenth century often included salt pork, which turned a vegetable dish into the centre of a meal, and the instruction to boil the stripped cobs for the cooking water is a thrifty habit of the period. Books like this one still treat succotash as a substantial summer supper rather than the side of corn and limas with butter it became once canned and frozen vegetables made it a year-round convenience.