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Succotash (Use double the quantity)
Use double the quantity of corn that you do beans. Cook the beans for at least three hours; put in corn and let it cook one hour, having just enough water to cook them in, being very careful not to let it stick. Season with salt, pepper and butter.
A recipe written for a cook who already knew what succotash was: no quantities, no yield, and a three-hour bean simmer that tells you more than the text does. The proportion is the only measurement given — two parts corn to one part beans by volume.
- The beans are dried, not freshNothing green cooks for three hours. This calls for dried shell beans — cranberry, lima or navy — soaked overnight and simmered until tender. If you use fresh or frozen lima beans instead, they need 15 to 25 minutes, and the corn goes in near the end.
- The hour for the corn assumes dried corn tooFresh sweet corn cut from the cob is done in five minutes and turns starchy and grey after an hour. A full hour of simmering makes more sense for dried or parched corn, a common winter form. With fresh or frozen kernels, add them for the last five to eight minutes.
- "Just enough water" is the hingeThe dish is meant to finish nearly dry, the starch from corn and beans thickening what liquid remains. That is also why it scorches. Keep the pot barely covered with liquid, stir up from the bottom regularly, and use a heavy-bottomed pan over low heat.
- Quantities to work fromA cup of dried beans and two cups of corn kernels, seasoned with a tablespoon or two of butter, gives four to six servings as a side dish.
- Salt timingSalt the beans only once they are tender. Salting at the start is traditionally said to slow the softening, though the evidence for that is mixed; three hours can still leave dried beans chalky.
- Butter and enrichmentSeason generously — butter is the whole of the richness here. Some versions of the dish finish with a few tablespoons of cream or milk, which is worth doing if the mixture has cooked drier than you want.
Succotash comes from the Narragansett msickquatash, roughly "boiled corn kernels," and the dish is the clearest surviving trace in American cooking of the Native practice of growing and eating corn and beans together he other and, as it happens, in the bowl. Colonial and later American households appear to have taken it up widely, and it is often said to have existed in two versions: a summer dish of fresh sweet corn and green limas, quick to make, and a winter dish of dried corn and dried shell beans that had to be soaked and stewed for hours. The three-hour simmer here places this squarely in the second camp, which is why the book can be so casual about quantities: succotash of this kind was pantry cooking, made from whatever the household had put by, and the only thing worth writing down was the ratio.