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Lima Beans
Cover the beans with freshly boiled soft water, and boil thirty minutes, drain, add salt, pepper and butter, or to every pint of beans a quarter cup of boiling cream. .
A sprig of mint may be boiled with the beans and removed before serving.
A bare-bones treatment of fresh shell beans, written when limas came to the kitchen in the pod in high summer. The instructions assume fresh beans, not dried, and that changes everything about the timing.
- Fresh, not driedThe thirty-minute boil with no soaking indicates shelled fresh (or very young green) lima beans rather than dried. Frozen baby limas are the closest modern equivalent and need 8-12 minutes. Dried limas require soaking and a much longer simmer and will not behave as described.
- Thirty minutes is too longThirty minutes may be long -- Frozen or very young beans will go mushy well before half an hour; large fresh shelled limas can take close to that. Cook until the beans are tender to the tooth and still holding their shape, then drain at once.
- "Soft water"Nineteenth-century cooks distinguished hard well water, whose minerals toughen bean skins, from soft rain or boiled water. Modern tap water is fine; if yours is very hard, the skins may stay firm a little longer.
- Salt after, not duringThe recipe adds salt only at the end. Salting the cooking water seasons the beans better and does no harm; either order works.
- The cream measureA quarter cup of boiling cream per pint of shelled beans. Heat the cream before adding so it does not cool the dish.
- MintA single sprig boiled with the beans and lifted out gives a faint background note rather than a mint flavour. Add it to the water at the start and fish it out before draining.
- YieldA pint of shelled beans serves three to four as a side dish.
Lima beans reached European kitchens from the Andes and Central America, and the name is generally traced to the port of Lima, from which shipments were sent north in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By the time cookery books were being written for American households, fresh limas were sold in the pod in late summer and shelled at home. The recipe's austerity is notable: a vegetable is boiled, drained, dressed with butter or a spoonful of cream, and sent to table without sauce-making or a second cooking.