Home › Soups › Puree of Lima Beans
Puree of Lima Beans
1 pt. Lima beans 6 pts. cold water 3 small tomatoes 1 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon Gold Medal flour 2 teaspoons salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper Few grains cayenne Soak beans over night if dry; in the morning drain and add cold water. Cook until soft, rub through a sieve, add salt, pepper and cayenne. Reheat soup, melt butter, add Gold Medal flour, cook together until perfectly smooth, add 1 cup of soup, stirring all the time. Add to the remainder of the soup. Slice the tomatoes very thin, add to the soup and cook three minutes. Soup stock or the thin part of a can of tomatoes may be used to cook the beans with in place of the water.
A plain flour-thickened bean puree from a milling company's promotional book. The proportions are generous with liquid, and the tomatoes go in at the very end on purpose.
- QuantitiesA pint of dried lima beans is 2 cups, roughly 14 oz to 1 lb. Six pints of water is 12 cups (3 quarts) — a large stockpot, and enough for eight or more servings.
- Dry vs. fresh"Soak beans over night if dry" tells you the recipe was written for either dried limas or fresh shell beans in season. Dried large limas generally need about an hour of simmering after soaking; fresh limas need 20 to 30 minutes and no soak.
- SievingRubbing through a sieve was the usual household method of pureeing a soup in this period, and it removes the skins. A blender or immersion blender does the job faster, but pass it through a sieve afterward if you want the same smoothness.
- The rouxThe critical step is tempering: cook the butter and flour together until smooth, then beat in one cup of hot soup before returning it to the pot. Adding flour paste directly to three quarts of liquid gives lumps.
- Tomatoes lastThree minutes only. The sliced tomato is there for brightness and a little acid, not to break down.
- ConsistencySix pints of water to a pint of beans gives a thin soup by modern taste. Reduce the water to 4 pints, or simmer uncovered to concentrate, if you want something closer to a modern puree.
- SeasoningTwo teaspoons of salt is right for the full 3 quarts if you use water; cut it back if you cook the beans in stock or canned tomato liquid as the note suggests.
- The flourGold Medal flour here is simply an all-purpose family flour; any plain white flour will do much the same in a roux.
This comes from one of the cookbooks published by the Washburn-Crosby milling company of Minneapolis to promote Gold Medal flour, a genre of branded cookery book that flourished in the United States from the 1880s through the 1930s: recipes were competent and conventional, and the company's product was named in the ingredient list whether or not the brand mattered. The dish itself belongs to the American vogue for purees — soups built on a sieved vegetable base rather than meat stock — which filled the soup chapters of turn-of-the-century household manuals and gave cooks a way to serve a formal first course without a stockpot going all day. Lima beans, usually said to take their name from Lima, Peru, and grown widely in the United States by this period, were a cheap and reliable dried staple, and the butter-and-flour thickening is an ordinary roux of the kind standard in American cookery of the period.