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Winter Succotash
Wash one pint lima beans (dried when green) and one and a half pints dried corn; put beans in kettle and cover with cold water; cover corn with cold water in a tin pan, set on top of kettle of beans so that while the latter are boiling the corn may be heating and swelling; boil beans fifteen minutes, drain off, cover with boiling water, and when tender (half an hour) add corn, cooking both together for fifteen minutes; five minutes before serving, add salt, pepper and a dressing of butter and flour rubbed together, or onehalf tea-cup cream or milk thickened with one table-spoon flour.
A pantry version of succotash built entirely from dried goods, with a bit of improvised stacked cookware to save fuel. Most of it translates directly; the timings are the part that will not.
- The timing is the weak pointThe recipe allows a fifteen-minute boil, a drain, and about half an hour more before the beans are called tender. Unsoaked dried limas will often want longer than that; soak them overnight, or allow an hour or more of simmering, and taste rather than watch the clock.
- Salt at the end, as writtenThe instruction to add salt five minutes before serving is deliberate and worth keeping. Salting dried beans early was believed to toughen the skins; whether or not that holds, adding it late lets you season the finished dish accurately once the liquid has reduced.
- "Dried when green"This means limas dried at the green shell stage rather than left to mature and go starchy white. Modern baby limas are the closest supermarket match; large white limas will work but cook longer and taste mealier.
- Dried cornNot cornmeal, not hominy, and not popcorn. This is sweet corn cut from the cob and dehydrated, sold today as dried sweet corn or Pennsylvania Dutch style corn. If you cannot find it, frozen corn added in the last few minutes gives a different but perfectly good dish.
- The stacked pansSetting the pan of corn and cold water on the lid of the boiling beans is a fuel-saving trick from the range era. Any bowl over a simmering pot does the same, or simply soak the corn separately in hot water while the beans cook.
- MeasuresOne pint of dried limas is about two cups, roughly a pound; a pint and a half of dried corn is three cups. Dried corn swells considerably, so use a roomy kettle.
- The two finishesButter and flour rubbed together is a beurre manie, stirred in raw and cooked briefly to thicken the pot liquor. The alternative, half a teacup of cream or milk with a tablespoon of flour, gives a creamier, paler succotash. A teacup in books of this period is variously reckoned, somewhere between four and six ounces.
- YieldThe quantities are large: two cups of dried beans and three of dried corn make a big potful, enough for eight or more as a side dish. It thickens further as it stands and will need a splash of water when reheated.
Succotash comes from the Narragansett msickquatash, a word for boiled corn kernels, and the dish is one of the clearest survivals of Native American cooking in the Anglo-American kitchen: beans and corn grown together, eaten together, and stored together for winter. What makes this version a winter one is that both components are dried. Before home canning and freezing were widespread, a farm household strung and dried its sweet corn and shelled its limas green, and the succotash that appeared in February was reconstituted rather than fresh. Buckeye Cookery, which grew out of the Buckeye Cookbook of the mid-1870s and appeared in Ohio as Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping in 1877, with later editions running into the 1880s, is full of this kind of economy, including the small detail of perching the corn pan on the bean kettle so one fire does two jobs.