Succotash
1 pint shelled Lima beans. 1 quart green corn, out from the cob. 1 quart tomatoes, prepared and seasoned as for baking.
Boil the corn and beans together till done, then drain off the water and pour in a cup of milk, a tablespoonful of butter, and salt to the taste. Let it boil up, and then pour in the tomatoes. Let all simmer an hour. Baked or stewed dishes should have cracker or brown biscuit grated on top, before sending to the table.--Mrs. S. T.
A straightforward late-summer vegetable dish, though the timings assume vegetables far tougher than what comes out of a modern market. The one thing to watch is the milk: it goes in before the tomatoes, and an hour of simmering with that much acid will curdle it.
- Green cornFresh sweet corn cut from the cob, not dried or field corn. A quart of kernels is roughly 6 to 8 ears. Frozen kernels work and need no boiling beyond a few minutes of heating.
- Lima beansA pint of shelled fresh limas is roughly 10 to 12 oz. Fresh limas need 20 to 30 minutes; frozen baby limas need about 8. Dried limas are a different proposition entirely and would need soaking and long cooking before they join the corn.
- "Prepared and seasoned as for baking"I.e. tomatoes peeled, cored, roughly cut up and seasoned, as a baked-tomato recipe of the period would have them. A quart is about 2 lb of fresh tomatoes, or one 28 oz can with its juice.
- The hour of simmeringModern corn is bred for tenderness and sugar and will turn starchy and grey in that time. Fifteen to twenty minutes after the tomatoes go in is enough to marry the flavours.
- Milk and acidWhole milk held at a simmer with tomatoes will separate. Keep the heat low and do not let it boil hard after the tomatoes are in, or stir the milk in at the end and simply heat it through.
- The toppingGrated cracker or dried brown biscuit scattered over the top before serving. Coarse dry breadcrumbs, toasted in butter, do the same job.
- YieldServes six to eight as a side dish. Salt at the end rather than the start; the cracker topping adds its own.
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 Native American cookery in the Anglo-American kitchen. Corn and beans were grown together and eaten together long before European contact, and colonists adopted both the combination and a version of the name. The tomatoes here are a nineteenth-century addition; Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878) collected contributions from some 250 Virginia housewives, and Mrs. S. T.'s version comes from a period in which tomatoes were commonplace, though the story that they had only lately shed a reputation as suspect is more often repeated than documented. The instruction to top baked and stewed dishes with grated cracker is a house habit rather than anything specific to succotash.