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Boiled Haricot (Small Dried Lima) Beans
Wash and pick the beans, and soak them in cold water overnight. Drain them, and put them into a saucepan with plenty of cold water; add a pinch of salt, and let them simmer gently until tender. Pour the water from them, let them stand by the fire, shaking them once or twice to assist their drying, then add a small piece of butter, and a little pepper and salt, and serve as hot as possible. Time, two hours to boil. Sufficient, one pint for three or four persons.
A plain boiled bean dish that depends almost entirely on judgment about doneness rather than the clock. The two-hour figure is an outer limit, not a target.
- Which beanThe title conflates two things: a haricot is the white kidney-shaped bean (navy, cannellini, flageolet), while a small dried lima is the butter bean or sieva bean. Either works with this method, but limas cook faster and break down more readily into a creamy mass.
- TimingSoaked beans of recent harvest are usually tender in 45 to 90 minutes. Two hours suggests old, hard stock; taste at 45 minutes and then every 15. Beans held several years may never soften fully, whatever you do.
- The pinch of saltSalting the cooking water is now considered helpful rather than harmful — it seasons the interior and does not toughen skins, contrary to long-standing kitchen lore. Use about a teaspoon per quart rather than a pinch.
- Gentle simmerThis is the hinge. A rolling boil bursts the skins and turns the pot cloudy and broken; keep the surface barely trembling and the beans hold their shape.
- "Let them stand by the fire"Drying off the drained beans over the fading heat of the range. Return them to the dry pan over the lowest burner for a minute or two, shaking, until the surface steam has gone — otherwise the butter slides off into water at the bottom.
- QuantityOne pint of dry beans is roughly 2 cups, or about 14 oz, and swells to some 5 cups cooked. That serves three or four as a substantial side.
- ButterA "small piece" reads as 1 to 2 tablespoons. Add it off the heat with the pepper so it emulsifies with the residual moisture and coats rather than fries.
Dried haricots were the cheap winter protein of the nineteenth-century English and American household — storable for years, needing no ice, and sold by the peck. The plain boiled bean is a baseline entry that other recipes then build on with bacon, tomato or a purée. The soak-overnight-then-simmer method predates any understanding of why it works: cold soaking rehydrates the cotyledon slowly and evenly, which is why the beans hold together instead of blowing apart. The name haricot is traced to the French; a derivation from a Nahuatl word for the bean has been proposed but is disputed.