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Lima Beans and Mushrooms
2 cups cooked Lima beans 2 cups fresh mushrooms 1 tablespoon butter 1/4 cup cream 1/4 teaspoon salt Use beans that have been cooked and seasoned with salt, pepper and butter. Put butter in a sauce-pan, add beans and mushrooms and cream; let simmer for about ten minutes and serve hot. Dried Lima beans should be soaked over night before using, drained and cooked in boiling water until soft. Season with cream and butter.
A short creamed-vegetable dish that assumes the beans are already cooked and seasoned. Everything depends on getting the mushrooms cooked down before the cream is added.
- Cook the mushrooms firstA tablespoon of butter and ten minutes of gentle simmering will not drive off the water fresh mushrooms release, and the cream ends up thin and grey. Slice them and saute in the butter over fairly high heat until the liquid has evaporated and they begin to brown, then add the beans and cream and simmer to bring together.
- QuantitiesTwo cups of fresh mushrooms is roughly 5 to 6 oz whole, which cooks down to very little. If you want the mushrooms to register against two cups of beans, use 8 oz.
- CreamIn a book of this period "cream" would generally have meant something in the light-to-heavy range rather than milk; the page gives no further definition. A quarter cup of heavy cream will reduce to a coating sauce in the ten minutes given; lower-fat dairy is more liable to break.
- Which limaEither the small green ("baby") or the large flat butter bean works. Frozen baby limas are the easiest substitute for fresh shelled beans, and need about 10 minutes in salted water.
- Dried beansThe overnight soak is still the best method. After draining, simmer in fresh unsalted water 45 to 90 minutes depending on age of the beans, until they crush easily against the pan; large limas foam heavily, so skim and keep the heat low or they break apart.
- Season at the endThe quarter teaspoon of salt assumes the beans were already salted and buttered. Taste after the cream goes in and adjust; mushrooms absorb a surprising amount of salt, and a little black pepper or nutmeg is period-appropriate.
- YieldServes four as a side dish.
The Gold Medal Flour Cook Book was published by the Washburn-Crosby Company, the Minneapolis milling firm that later became General Mills, as promotional literature built around its flagship flour, though the vegetable chapters like this one have nothing to do with flour at all. Lima beans are generally said to take their name from Lima, Peru, where the large flat variety was long cultivated before reaching North America; by the time this book appeared they were a staple of American gardens in both the small green and large butter-bean forms. The pairing with mushrooms marks the recipe as slightly genteel for its date: commercial mushroom growing in the United States developed only around the 1890s, and cultivated button mushrooms still read on a menu as a small luxury laid over an everyday vegetable.