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Curried Lima Beans
Chop 1 onion finely and fry it for a few minutes in 2 tablespoons Crisco, add 1 tablespoon curry powder, 1 teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon flour, 1 teaspoon lemon juice, and 1 cup water, allow to cook slowly for 20 minutes, then add 1 1/2 cups cooked lima beans, mix well and serve hot.
A simple curry sauce built in the pan and finished with cooked beans. The only real decisions are the fat and how long the spice cooks.
- CriscoCrisco was the new all-vegetable shortening when this book was written, and the recipe is effectively an advertisement for it. Butter, ghee or a neutral oil can be used in the same quantity.
- Fry the curry powderThe powder goes into the hot fat with the onion before any liquid; the recipe gives no interval, but half a minute or so in fat blooms it, whereas powder merely loosened in water tastes dusty.
- The flour is a tokenOne teaspoon of flour in a cup of water gives barely any body. Expect a thin, souplike sauce; if you want it to cling to the beans, use a tablespoon.
- Twenty minutes of slow cookingThe sauce will reduce noticeably in that time, which is the point. Keep it at a bare simmer and add a splash of water if it tightens too far before the beans go in.
- Lima beansCooked means fully tender, not blanched. Dried limas soaked and simmered are closest to the original; frozen baby limas cooked through are a reasonable substitute, and canned beans need only warming and will break up if stirred hard.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt for roughly two and a half cups of finished dish assumes unsalted beans. Taste before adding it all if your beans were salted or canned.
- YieldAbout two and a half cups before reduction, which will stretch to two servings with rice or four as a side. It reheats well and thickens on standing.
A Calendar of Dinners was published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which is why the shortening appears in a dish that in any other cookbook would call for butter or lard — the book's purpose was to show the new fat doing everything the old ones did. The recipe itself belongs to a long Anglo-American habit of using commercial curry powder as a general-purpose savory seasoning for vegetables, eggs and leftovers, a practice inherited from British Indian cookery and by the 1910s thoroughly domesticated: a spoonful of powder, an onion, a little flour and water made a sauce that could carry almost anything.