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Succotash (Take pint of shelled lima)
Take pint of shelled lima beans (green), wash, cover with hot water, let stand five minutes, pour off, place over fire in hot water, and boil fifteen minutes; have ready corn from six good-sized ears, and add to beans; boil half an hour, add salt, pepper and two table-spoons butter. Be careful in cutting down corn not to cut too deep; better not cut deep enough and then scrape; after corn is added, watch carefully to keep from scorching. Or, to cook with meat, boil one pound salt pork two hours, add beans, cook fifteen minutes, then add corn, omitting butter. Or, string beans may be used, cooking one hour before adding corn.
A straightforward vegetable dish that needs only unit clarification and a shorter clock. The original timings assume field corn and mature shell beans, both starchier than what a supermarket sells.
- QuantitiesA pint of shelled lima beans is about 2 cups, roughly 10-12 oz. Corn from six good-sized ears yields about 3 cups of kernels. Together this serves four to six as a side.
- The scraping instruction is the hingeCut only the tops of the kernels, then scrape the cobs with the back of the knife to release the milky starch. That liquid is what binds the dish; skip it and you have beans and corn sitting in water.
- Cut the corn's cooking timeHalf an hour will reduce modern sweet corn to mush. Add the kernels and scrapings in the last 5-8 minutes, just long enough to heat through and thicken.
- BeansFresh green limas take 15-20 minutes; frozen baby limas need about 10. Dried limas are a different ingredient and want soaking and an hour or more before the corn goes in.
- The initial soakCovering with hot water for five minutes and pouring it off may have been a way of cleaning or freshening garden-picked beans; the recipe does not say why. It does no harm and can be skipped with frozen or bagged beans.
- Salt pork versionTwo hours of boiling gives a well-salted broth; taste before adding any salt at all. If the pork is very salty, start the beans in the cooking liquid diluted with fresh water.
- Water levelThe warning about scorching is real. Once the corn starch is in, the pan thickens fast; keep the liquid just at the level of the vegetables and stir from the bottom.
- String beansThe third variation uses snap beans, cut into inch lengths. An hour is far too long for tender modern green beans; 8-12 minutes brings them to the point where they will take the corn.
Succotash comes from a Narragansett word, usually given as msickquatash, meaning boiled whole kernels of corn. The dish is generally traced to a Native American technique taken up in colonial and later American kitchens, though the versions here, with butter or salt pork, are not the original preparation. Corn and beans grew together in the field and complement each other on the plate. Buckeye Cookery (published in Minneapolis in 1877 and reprinted for decades) gives three versions here, which would suit whatever a nineteenth-century garden had ready at a given point in the season. The instruction to cut the kernels shallow and then scrape is usually explained by the tougher, starchier corn varieties of the period, the hull being left behind on the cob.