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Succotash
10 ears of corn 1 qt. Lima beans 2 tablespoons butter 1 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper 1 cup sweet cream With a sharp knife, cut the corn from the cobs and add to the Lima beans the last fifteen minutes of cooking. The mixture should be cooked nearly dry. Add butter, seasonings and cream, and simmer for ten minutes.
A straightforward vegetable dish, but the original assumes you already know how long to boil fresh shell beans — that step is left entirely unstated.
- The missing bean timeFresh shelled lima beans need roughly 20–30 minutes at a bare simmer in salted water to reach tenderness; dried limas need soaking and about an hour. The corn goes in for the last fifteen minutes of whatever that time turns out to be, so taste a bean before you commit.
- "Cooked nearly dry"This is the hinge. Boil off almost all the water before the butter and cream go in, or the finished succotash is soup. Uncover the pan for the last several minutes if it is still loose.
- QuantitiesTen ears yields somewhere around 5 to 7 cups of kernels depending on size; a quart of shelled limas is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb. Together this serves eight or so as a side, which is a Sunday-table quantity rather than a weeknight one. Halving works without adjustment.
- Cutting the cornStand the ear in a wide bowl and cut down at about two-thirds the kernel depth, then scrape the cob with the back of the knife to release the milky base. That scraped liquid is much of the sweetness and body here.
- Sweet creamIn this period the phrase simply meant fresh, unsoured cream — not sweetened. Heavy cream is the closest match; half-and-half will work but gives a thinner result.
- Frozen substitutesFrozen corn and frozen baby limas are an honest stand-in out of season. Both are already blanched, so simmer the beans 10 minutes, add the corn for 3–4, then drain well before proceeding to butter and cream.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt is for the finish only; salt the bean water separately. Taste after the cream goes in, since dairy flattens salt.
Succotash comes from the Narragansett msickquatash, roughly "boiled corn kernels," and the dish of corn cooked with beans is one of the clearest survivals of Indigenous foodways in the Anglo-American kitchen he eaten together, long before English cooks wrote them down. By the time this recipe appeared, succotash was a well-established summer dish, made with fresh shell beans and the season's corn; the butter and cream finish is probably a later refinement rather than anything original to it. Lima beans, despite the name and their South American origin, had become the standard commercial choice in the East, while cranberry or horticultural beans persisted in home gardens. The winter version, made from dried beans and dried corn, was a different and much plainer thing, and the insistence here on cutting kernels from ten fresh ears marks this as a recipe for August.