Lima Beans
Shell and throw into cold water. Put in boiling water an hour before dinner; add some salt; when tender, drain off the water and add a tablespoonful fresh butter. Beans are seldom cooked enough.--Mrs. S. T.
Lima Beans.
Shell and lay in cold water. Boil thoroughly, and then stew a little with butter, pepper, salt, and cream.--Mrs. R.
Two brief methods from different contributors, both assuming freshly shelled green limas straight from the pod. The timings belong to a garden crop picked at whatever stage it happened to reach, not to the uniform young beans sold frozen today.
- The hinge: know which bean you haveFresh-shelled young limas are tender in 15-25 minutes; large mature ones can take 45 minutes or more. Frozen baby limas need about 8-10 minutes. Start tasting early rather than trusting the hour.
- "An hour before dinner"The instruction is pegged to the dinner hour rather than given as a tested cooking time, though it does imply roughly an hour in the pot. Mrs. S. T.'s parting remark that "beans are seldom cooked enough" suggests she expected them soft, well past the firm-tender point favored now.
- The cold-water soakBoth cooks throw the shelled beans into cold water. With fresh beans this is holding water to keep them from drying and darkening while the rest are shelled, not a soak in the dried-bean sense. Dried limas would need several hours or overnight.
- Salt timingSalt is added to the boiling water here, which is fine for fresh beans. If you substitute dried limas, some cooks salt only toward the end on the grounds that early salting toughens the skins, though that point is disputed.
- "Fresh butter"In period usage this generally meant unsalted, newly churned butter as opposed to the salted keeping butter of the larder. Modern unsalted butter is the nearest equivalent. A tablespoon would dress enough beans for about four.
- Mrs. R.'s cream finishThe beans are boiled thoroughly, then stewed a little with butter, cream, pepper and salt; the recipe does not mention draining, though one would. Heavy cream holds up best to the reheating; lighter creams are more likely to break.
- YieldNeither cook gives a quantity. Two pounds of limas in the pod yield roughly 2 cups shelled, enough for four as a side dish.
Lima beans reached Virginia kitchens by way of the Atlantic trade, but the plant is American in origin — Phaseolus lunatus was domesticated in the tropics of the New World, and its common name is often said to derive from the Peruvian port of Lima, though the story of the name appearing on seed sacks shipped north is traditional rather than documented. By the time Housekeeping in Old Virginia was compiled in 1878, limas were a familiar presence in the summer kitchen garden, eaten green and shelled through the hot months and dried for winter. The book's habit of printing two or three versions of the same dish over different contributors' initials is worth noticing here: it was assembled from the contributions of many Virginia housekeepers, and rather than reconciling them the editor let the disagreements stand. Mrs. S. T. wants plain butter and a long boil; Mrs. R. wants cream and pepper. Both were right in their own households.