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Succotash
Wash 1 pint shelled (green) lima beans, parboil about ten minutes, pour off water, add hot water, and boil about fifteen minutes longer. Cut corn from 6 or 8 good-sized ears and add to the beans. Boil one-half hour or until tender. Add salt, pepper, and about 2 tablespoonfuls butter. Care must be taken to prevent the mixture from burning. Scrape the milk from the cob after having cut the corn.
A plain summer succotash from the brief window when shell beans and sweet corn overlap. The one thing to change is the corn timing: half an hour will flatten it.
- Corn timingModern supersweet hybrids hold their sugar and tenderness better than the sweet corns available around 1900, and half an hour of boiling will flatten them either way. Add the kernels only in the last 5 to 10 minutes, once the beans are nearly soft, or they turn starchy and dull.
- Bean timingFresh shelled limas usually need 20 to 30 minutes total to reach creamy tenderness; older or larger ones take longer. Judge by taste rather than the clock, since the corn goes in only when the beans are close to done.
- The parboilThe recipe drains the first water and starts again with hot water; a plausible reason is to take off the grassy, slightly bitter edge of shell beans, though it is not stated. It is optional now, though it does give a cleaner-tasting pot; skipping it costs you nothing but a little flavour difference.
- Frozen beansA pint of shelled limas is roughly 10 to 12 oz, or about a standard bag of frozen baby limas. Frozen ones need no parboil and cook in 10 to 15 minutes.
- Scraping the cobThis is not a flourish. After cutting the kernels off, run the back of a knife down each cob to press out the starchy liquid; it is what thickens the pot and binds the dish together. Do it over the pan so nothing is lost.
- BurningThe corn milk settles and scorches easily over direct heat. Keep the flame low once the corn is in and stir up from the bottom every few minutes.
- Water levelThe recipe never says how much water. Use just enough to cover the beans by an inch; succotash should finish moist and barely saucy, not soupy, so let it reduce rather than draining it at the end.
- Seasoning and yieldSalt goes in at the end here, following the old belief that beans toughen in salted water; taste twice, as corn milk absorbs a surprising amount. Six to eight ears with a pint of beans serves four to six as a side dish. A splash of cream or milk with the butter is a common period variation.
Succotash comes into English from Narragansett msickquatash, meaning boiled corn kernels, and the dish is one of the clearest survivals of Native American cooking in the standard American kitchen repertoire. Corn and beans grown together, eaten together, and complementing each other nutritionally is an old and widespread practice across eastern North America; colonial households adopted it early and it stayed. By the time compilations like this one were printed, succotash had split into two lines: the fresh summer version given here, made in the few weeks when green shell beans and sweet corn are both in the garden, and a winter version built from dried beans and dried or canned corn, often with salt pork. The addition of butter, and in many contemporary recipes cream, marks the New England treatment; further south the same pair of vegetables is more likely to meet bacon fat, onion, and tomato.