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Lima Bean Soup (1 pint of freshly shelled lima)
1 pint of freshly shelled lima 3 tablespoonfuls of flour, beans, 1 sprig of parsley, 1 tablespoonful of butter, 1 stalk of celery, 1 clove, Piece of green pepper, I small onion.
Put the beans in one quart of water, add the parsley, celery, onion, clove, and pepper, and boil three-quarters of an hour. Press through a colander, saving all the liquor in which the beans were boiled. Return this to the kettle. Rub together the butter and flour, stir this into the beans, add one pint of milk and press the whole again through the purée sieve. Put into the farina boiler, season with salt and pepper, bring to boiling point and serve with croûtons.
CROÛTONS :-Butter lightly slices of bread, then cut into dice, rejecting all the crusts. Put the dice in a bakingpan and stand in a moderate oven until the bread is thor oughly dry and golden brown.
A straightforward purée soup from the era when every vegetable soup was pushed through a sieve twice. The ingredient list reads oddly because it was set in two narrow columns; read it as beans, parsley, celery, clove, green pepper, onion, flour and butter.
- Quantities, sorted outOne pint of shelled lima beans (about 12 oz, or roughly 2 cups), one quart water, 1 tablespoon butter, 3 tablespoons flour, 1 pint milk, plus a sprig of parsley, a stalk of celery, a small onion, one clove and a piece of green pepper.
- Cooking timeThree-quarters of an hour suits mature shelled limas. Frozen baby limas will be soft in 20 to 25 minutes, and boiling them longer only dulls the colour and flavour.
- The farina boilerThat is a double boiler. Once the milk and flour are in, gentle indirect heat keeps the starch and dairy from scorching on the bottom. A heavy saucepan over low heat with steady stirring does the same job.
- Butter and flourRubbing them together raw makes a beurre manié, thickening the soup as it heats. It must be whisked in off the boil in small pieces or it will lump; alternatively cook it as a roux first for a cleaner taste.
- SievingTwo passes through a sieve were the usual route to a smooth purlender or immersion blender replaces the first pass entirely; a single pass through a fine sieve afterwards still improves the texture, since lima skins do not break down.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no figure; treat it as around 350F. Ten to fifteen minutes, turning once, dries the dice through rather than just browning the outside.
- SeasoningSalt goes in at the end here, after the milk. Taste generously — a bean purée absorbs a surprising amount, and a scrape of nutmeg or a squeeze of lemon lifts it.
- YieldAbout five cups, serving four as a first course.
Lima beans are generally said to take their name from Lima, the Peruvian capital; American seed catalogues sold them as "Lima" and "butter" beans more or less interchangeably. Pur fvegetable soups of this kind, thickened with flour and finished with milk, were common on the genteel American table around 1900, and the instruction to press the whole thing through a sieve twice reflects a period taste for perfect smoothness achieved by sheer labour. The clove and the fragment of green pepper are characteristic touches of the same cookery f a single warm spice and a little vegetable sharpness standing in for stock in a meatless soup. Cro tons dried in the oven rather than fried in fat mark it as a light course meant to open a meal, not carry it.