Home › Vegetables › Lima Beans (Cover the beans with freshly)
Lima Beans (Cover the beans with freshly)
Cover the beans with freshly boiled water, add a teaspoonful of salt, and boil thirty minutes; drain, season with pepper and salt, and add to them sufficient butter to make them palatable. Half a cup of scalded cream may also be added; a sprig of mint may be boiled with the beans but removed before serving.
LIMA BEANS, (DRIED).
Soak one pint of beans in water over night. In the morning drain off this water and cover with fresh water. Two hours before dinner time drain again, cover with boiling, soft water, and boil thirty minutes. Drain again, cover with fresh, boiling soft water; add one-eighth of a teaspoonful of bicarbonate of soda and boil until tender. Drain, season with salt and pepper, dredge over them a tablespoonful of flour; add a tablespoonful of butter, a half-pint of cream, let them boil up once and serve; or they may be served with butter, salt and pepper.
All shelled beans, butter, kidney, case-knife and the small French beans may be cooked in precisely the same manner. The main point to be remembered is that all dry beans must be cooked in soft water and all green beans in hard water.
Two recipes in one entry: fresh shell beans first, then dried. The advice about water hardness at the end is the part worth taking seriously, though the boiling times are of their era.
- Thirty minutes is too long for freshFresh shelled limas are tender in 10 to 15 minutes; frozen baby limas in 5 to 8. Thirty minutes will leave modern beans mealy and grey.
- Hard water for green, soft for driedThis is sound. Calcium and magnesium in hard water cross-link the pectin in bean skins and slow softening, which helps fresh beans hold their shape but keeps dried ones stubborn. If your tap water is very hard, cook dried limas in filtered or distilled water rather than reaching for more soda.
- The sodaAn eighth of a teaspoon to a pint of beans is a restrained amount and will speed softening without harm. More than that turns the skins slippery, gives a soapy taste, and destroys thiamine. Do not scale it up because the beans are slow.
- Discard the soaking waterThe instruction to drain and re-cover twice is not fussiness. It removes the indigestible oligosaccharides that leach out overnight, and it flushes the foam. Keep doing it.
- QuantitiesA pint of dried limas is roughly 13 to 14 ounces, and yields about five cups cooked, enough for four to six as a side. A half-pint of cream is one cup; scalded means heated to just below the boil, not boiled.
- The flour dredgeSprinkling dry flour over hot drained beans and then adding butter and cream makes a thin sauce in the pan. Stir it into the melted butter before the cream goes in, or it will set in lumps against the beans.
- SaltSalt the dried beans once they are tender, as written. Salting the long boil is no longer thought to prevent softening.
- Case-knife beansAn old name for a flat, broad pole bean, so called for the shape of the pod. Any large flat shell bean, including runner beans and fresh cranberry beans, behaves the same way here.
The lima bean is Phaseolus lunatus, domesticated more than once -- the large-seeded types in the Andes, the smaller sieva types in Mesoamerica -- and the name is traditionally traced to the Peruvian capital, from whose port dried beans were shipped north through the nineteenth century; the large flat variety carried the city's name while the sieva type became the butter bean of the American South. A cookbook of this period had to give both a fresh and a dried recipe because the fresh season was short and local, and the dried bean was a winter staple sold from the barrel. The closing note about hard and soft water reflects a household reality now largely forgotten: cooks knew their own well or cistern water intimately, and whether it was hard or soft governed everything from bean cookery to laundry.