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Lima Beans (Cool When cold form into small)
cool. When cold, form into small balls, dip first in egg and then in bread crumbs, and fry in smoking hot fat. LIMA BEANS, à la POULETTE.
1 pint of young beans, 1 tablespoonful of butter, Yolks of two eggs, Dash of pepper, 1/2 pint of milk, 2 level tablespoonfuls of flour, 1/2 teaspoonful of salt, 1/2 teaspoonful of onion juice.
Cover the beans with boiling water, add a speck of bicarbonate of soda, and boil thirty minutes. Drain, put the butter in a saucepan; when melted add the flour, mix; add the milk, stir until boiling; add the salt, pepper and onion juice. Take from the fire, add the yolks of the eggs, beaten. Dish the beans, pour over the sauce and serve very hot.
A plain white sauce enriched with egg yolks, poured over shell beans. Note that the first line and a half on this page are the tail end of the preceding croquette recipe, not part of the lima beans.
- The hinge: yolks off the heatOnce the beaten yolks go in, the sauce must not return to a boil or it will curdle into grains. Take the pan off the burner, stir the yolks in briskly, and serve at once; if it needs holding, keep it over warm water rather than direct heat.
- A pint of beansMeasured shelled, so about 2 cups, roughly 10-12 oz, close to a bag of frozen baby limas. Fresh shelled limas at that volume come from something in the range of 2 to 3 lb in the pod.
- Skip the sodaThe "speck of bicarbonate of soda" was added to keep the green colour and soften skins. It destroys thiamine, makes the skins slippery and can leave a soapy taste. Salted water alone is better.
- Thirty minutes is too longThat timing assumes older, starchier field beans. Frozen baby limas need 5-8 minutes; young fresh ones 15-20. Cook until a bean crushes easily against the roof of the mouth, then drain, or the dish becomes mush under the sauce.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion on a box grater and press the pulp through a fine sieve, or squeeze it in a square of cheesecloth. Half a teaspoon of the juice gives onion flavour without pieces in a pale sauce.
- Sauce proportionsTwo level tablespoons flour to one of butter is a lean roux; if the sauce seems tight, use a scant 2 tablespoons butter. The half pint of milk is one cup, and the finished sauce should coat a spoon before the yolks go in.
- YieldServes three or four as a side dish. Best made immediately before it goes to the table, since an egg-thickened sauce does not reheat well.
À la poulette names one of the older working sauces of French cookery: a light velouté or white sauce finished off the heat with egg yolks, usually with lemon and parsley, and traditionally served with mussels, tripe, sweetbreads or frogs' legs. American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries borrowed the term freely and applied it to vegetables, which is how a New World bean ends up under a French name. The poulette is generally explained as a diminutive of poule, hen, from the sauce's use with fowl and its yellow colour. Lima beans themselves are an American domesticate, named for the Peruvian capital, and were common enough in American kitchen gardens that books of this era distinguish carefully between the small "young" or baby sort called for here and the large starchy ones sold dried. The pinch of bicarbonate is a period fingerprint: soda was widely recommended for greens and beans to fix their colour.