Succotash
Shell lima beans, wash and cover with boiling water; heat to boiling point and drain; throw away water and rinse beans, drain again. Cook in boiling, salted water until tender. Drain and add to an equal quantity of hot boiled corn cut from the cob. Season with salt, pepper and butter. Reheat before serving.
A plain August succotash from the height of the fresh corn and shell bean season. The method is sound, but it assumes fresh-shelled limas and just-picked corn, which changes the timings.
- The parboil-and-drain stepThe recipe gives no reason for the initial boil-and-discard; the usual explanation is that it rinses away the starchy scum fresh limas throw. With frozen limas, which are already blanched, the step is unlikely to be worth the trouble.
- How long the beans needFresh shelled limas take 20 to 30 minutes at a gentle boil, depending on size and age. Frozen baby limas need 8 to 10 minutes. Dried limas are not a substitute here without soaking and much longer cooking.
- "Hot boiled corn"The recipe assumes corn boiled on the cob and then cut off. Two to three minutes in boiling water is plenty for modern sweet corn.
- Cutting the kernelsStand the cob in a wide bowl and cut down with a knife; some cooks then scrape the cob with the back of the blade to release the milky pulp. The recipe asks only that the corn be cut from the cob.
- Equal quantitiesThe recipe does not say whether 'equal quantity' means volume or weight; measuring by volume after shelling and cutting is the simpler reading. Roughly 2 cups of each makes a reasonable batch.
- Butter and reheatingAdd butter off the heat or over low heat only. "Reheat before serving" means warming through, not another boil, which softens the kernels and breaks the beans.
- YieldAbout 4 cups, serving four to six as a side dish. Yields vary a good deal, but somewhere around four to six ears of corn and 2 lb or more of limas in the pod should be in the right area.
Succotash comes from the Narragansett msickquatash, meaning roughly boiled whole kernels of corn, and the dish is one of the clearest survivals of Native American cooking in the standard American repertoire. Corn and beans were grown together in the same field and cooked together long before English cookbooks recorded the practice. New England versions leaned on shell beans and often salt pork; this one is a plainer summer treatment, keyed to the moment in August when fresh limas and sweet corn overlap. That seasonal logic is the whole point: the August menus are built on what a market or kitchen garden would actually have that month, and succotash is about as August as a vegetable dish gets.