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Lima Bean Puree
Cook the beans for ten minutes in boiling water; drain, rinse; put again into plenty of boiling water, cook till perfectly tender. Press the pulp through strainer; add milk or cream to make it of the usual consistency; and to each quart add a tablespoonful each of butter and flour cooked together, and stirred into the boiling liquid. Season with pepper and salt; serve with wafers.
A plain white puree soup built on a strainer and a small roux. The recipe gives no bean quantity; work backwards from the finished volume, which is what the roux measurement is keyed to.
- Quantity to start withAbout 1 lb dried lima beans, or 2 lb shelled fresh or frozen, yields roughly 2 quarts of finished soup once thinned. The butter-and-flour figure is given per quart of that finished liquid, not per pound of beans.
- Dried or freshThe parboil-and-rinse step suggests dried limas, which are usually soaked overnight before the first ten-minute boil, though the recipe itself specifies neither. Frozen baby limas can skip the soak and the parboil-and-rinse; simmer them 20-25 minutes and go straight to the strainer.
- Why the water is thrown awayThe ten-minute boil and rinse pulls out the raw, slightly grassy note and some of the gas-producing sugars in dried beans. It also means no bean broth is kept back, and the soup is thinned with milk or cream instead.
- Press the pulpA food mill with the medium plate does this cleanly and leaves the skins behind. A blender gives a smoother result but keeps the skins in, so pass it through a sieve afterward if you want the texture the recipe intends.
- The rouxA tablespoon each of butter and flour per quart is a light binding, not a thickening. Cook it a minute or two without colour, then whisk it into the simmering soup and hold at a bare simmer for five minutes to lose the raw flour taste.
- Consistency"The usual consistency" is left undefined; for a puree soup it is generally taken to mean thin enough to pour freely while just coating a spoon. Add the milk hot and in stages; bean puree stiffens noticeably as it stands and will need loosening before serving.
- SeasoningLimas are flat on their own. Salt firmly, and a scrape of nutmeg or a bay leaf simmered in the milk carries the dish without breaking with the original.
- WafersPeriod soup wafers were thin unsweetened crackers, closer to a water biscuit than to anything sweet. Plain crackers or croutons serve the same purpose.
- YieldAbout 2 quarts, serving six to eight as a first course.
Puree soups commonly occupy their own heading in turn-of-the-century American cookbooks, where they read as a technique as much as a set of dishes: cook a starchy vegetable soft, force it through a strainer, thin it with milk or stock, and bind it with a small roux. The same paragraph would serve for peas, split peas, chestnuts or potatoes with only the cooking time changed. Lima beans, generally held to take their name from Lima in Peru and long grown across the Americas, were a common pantry staple in dried form and cheap. Serving the soup with wafers is consistent with a first course rather than a supper in itself.