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Lima Bean Soup
2 C dried lima beans, washed and picked over. Cover with water and soak over night. In the morning put into kettle with 1 large onion, cut fine. Cook until done, then rub through sieve. Make a thin cream gravy by cooking 1 large T butter, 2 level T flour and 2 C milk in double boiler. Add pepper and salt to taste. Add the bean puree to the cream gravy and bring to the boiling point. Serve while hot.
A plain purée soup of the kind that turned a bag of dried beans into supper. The only technical step is the sieving, and a blender makes short work of it.
- YieldTwo cups of dried limas swell to roughly six cups cooked, and with the two cups of milk this makes about two quarts — six to eight servings as a first course.
- Which limaLarge dried limas (butter beans) are meant. Baby limas work and cook faster, about 45 minutes against 60 to 90 for the large ones after an overnight soak.
- Cooking liquidCook the beans in enough fresh water to cover by two inches. Hard water can slow softening; the old rule against salting early is often repeated but not well supported. Save the cooking liquid — you will want some of it to thin the purée.
- Instead of the sieveAn immersion blender or food processor does in a minute what the sieve did in ten. Push through a strainer afterward only if you want the skins out entirely, which is what the original sieving accomplished.
- "Thin cream gravy"This is a thin béchamel: 1 tablespoon butter to 2 tablespoons flour and 2 cups milk. Cook the butter and flour together a minute before the milk goes in so the soup does not taste of raw flour.
- The double boilerUsed here because milk scorches over direct heat on a coal or wood range. A heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium-low, stirred, does the same and is faster.
- Bring to the boiling point, then stopOnce the purée and the milk are combined, heat it just to a simmer. A hard boil on a floury, starchy soup makes it catch on the bottom and can curdle the milk.
- SeasoningBean purées need more salt than seems reasonable. A grating of nutmeg or a spoonful of sherry at the end, both period-appropriate, wakes it up considerably.
Church and society cookbooks of the early twentieth century are full of soups like this one — dried legumes, an onion, a milk thickening — because they cost almost nothing and stretched to feed a crowd at a supper or a Sunday dinner. The method is the standard American purée soup taught in the domestic-science schools of the period: cook the vegetable, force it through a sieve, and combine it with a thin white sauce so the result has body without cream. Lima beans themselves are a New World bean, generally traced to Peru and usually said to take their name from its capital, but by 1900 they were a thoroughly midwestern pantry staple, sold dried by the pound at any general store.