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Succotash
1 pint of young lima or kidney beans 1 pint of corn pressed from the cob 1/2 pint of milk or cream 1 tablespoonful of butter Salt and pepper to taste Shell the beans, cover them with boiling water, add a teaspoonful of salt, and boil twenty-five minutes; then add an eighth teaspoonful of baking soda, boil one minute, and drain. Score the corn and press it from the cob, add it to the beans, then add the milk, butter, salt and pepper, stir continually over the fire for five minutes, and it is ready to serve. In winter, when the corn and beans are dried, soak both separately over night. In the morning, cover the beans with fresh water, and boil gently for two hours. Do not drain the water from the corn, but keep it on the back part of the fire where it will not boil during the two hours the beans are boiling. When the beans are tender, drain them, add them to the corn, which should have just water enough to cover. Cook slowly for twenty minutes, then add the cream, butter, salt and pepper.
A straightforward two-vegetable dish whose only trick is the treatment of the corn. Everything else is timing.
- Score the corn, then pressRunning a knife tip down each row of kernels before scraping releases the milky interior and leaves the tough hulls on the cob. That milk is what thickens the dish; if you simply cut the kernels off whole you get a looser, blander succotash.
- Pint measuresA pint here is volume, not weight: 2 cups of shelled beans and 2 cups of kernels, about 4 medium ears. The half pint of milk is 1 cup.
- Twenty-five minutes is for mature beansYoung, freshly shelled limas are tender in 10 to 15 minutes; frozen baby limas in 5 to 8. Boil them to the stated time only if the beans are large and starchy, and taste before draining.
- The baking sodaAn eighth teaspoon softens skins and holds the green colour. It also destroys some thiamine and, left in longer than the minute specified, turns beans slippery and slightly soapy. It is optional and many cooks now skip it.
- Five minutes over the fireMedium heat, and the constant stirring is not fussiness -- milk with corn starch in it scorches on the bottom of a thin pan quickly. A heavy saucepan makes the stirring less urgent.
- The dried-corn versionThis is dried sweet corn, not hominy or cornmeal. It is held below a simmer for two hours to swell without breaking down; if it boils it goes to mush. Dried sweet corn is still sold, though you will likely order it rather than find it on a shelf.
- YieldServes four as a side dish. It thickens as it stands and reheats better with a splash of milk added.
The name comes from Narragansett, generally given as msickquatash, meaning something like boiled whole kernels of corn; the dish itself reflects the older Indigenous practice of growing and cooking corn and beans together, the pairing that also underlies the "three sisters" planting with squash. English colonists in New England adopted both the word and the dish, and by the nineteenth century succotash appeared in American cookbooks as a plain summer vegetable rather than anything exotic. As a summer dish it makes practical sense: it comes together in half an hour on top of the stove with no oven lit, and both ingredients are at their peak in the same weeks of high summer. The winter instructions at the end are a reminder that dried sweet corn, now a specialty item, was once an ordinary pantry staple in farmhouses that put up their own.