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Succotash
Old time succotash is made with shelled lima beans and corn cut from the cob. Put the beans on in as little water as possible, adding salt and pepper to season; when half done-in about twenty minutes-add a double amount of raw corn cut from the cob, and continue simmering until done. This may be slightly thickened with flour, and butter and milk added.
Stewed Beans, Onion Sauce Soak 1 pint of small white beans over night.
Drain, rinse, add fresh cold water, cook very slowly until tender but unbroken. In a clean saucepan put I large tablespoonful of butter and ½ cupful of chopped onion. Cook very slowly until the onion is tender and very slightly yellow.
Add 1 tablespoonful of flour, stir until mixed, then slowly add i pint of hot milk, stirring until thickened. Season with salt and pepper, simmer ten minutes, rub through a sieve. Drain the beans, add the sauce and simmer ten minutes. Celery sauce, made in the same way, a good brown gravy or a tomato sauce, may also be used.
Red Beans, Bretonne Style Pick over and wash some red or kidney beans.
Cover with cold water and soak over night then drain. Add more fresh cold water, heat and cook very slowly until the beans are perfectly tender but unbroken. As they reach this stage allow the liquid on them to evaporate so that, when done, they are nearly dry. For I large pint of the beans heat in a frying-pan 1 tablespoonful of good sweet dripping, add 2 tablespoonfuls of chopped onion and cook until the onion is slightly colored. Add the beans and stir occasionally until they look slightly fried. Turn them into a dish and sprinkle with chopped parsley. In Brittany when so prepared they are served round a roast of mutton.
A plain summer succotash that depends entirely on the ratio of corn to beans and on not overcooking either. The quantities are given by proportion rather than weight, which makes it easy to scale.
- ProportionsTwice as much corn as beans, by volume, measured after shelling and cutting. The recipe gives no quantities or yield, so scale by proportion.
- As little water as possibleThis is the hinge. The beans should braise in barely enough water to keep them from catching, so that what is left becomes the sauce rather than something to be drained away.
- Bean timingTwenty minutes to half-done assumes fresh shelled limas. Frozen baby limas are already blanched and reach that stage in six or eight minutes; dried limas must be soaked and simmered separately, then the corn added at the end.
- Corn timingRaw corn cut from the cob needs five to eight minutes at a simmer. Longer and the kernels toughen and lose their sweetness, which is the whole point of the dish.
- Cutting the cobCut the kernels off at about two-thirds of their depth, then scrape the cob with the back of the knife to release the milky starch. That scraping is what thickens the pot naturally.
- ThickeningIf you use the flour, work about a tablespoon into a like amount of soft butter and stir it in at the end, then add the milk and let it come back to a bare simmer. Milk added first and boiled hard is liable to curdle.
- SeasoningSeason the beans lightly at the start and correct at the end. The corn brings its own sweetness and shifts the balance.
Succotash comes from the Narragansett msickquatash, a word for boiled whole kernels of corn, and the dish is one of the clearest survivals of Native American cooking in the standard Anglo-American repertoire. Corn and beans were grown together in the same fields across much of eastern North America, and cooking them together was practical as well as traditional. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookbooks vary in whether the corn is green or dried, whether the beans are lima or cranberry, and whether salt pork belongs in the pot; the recipe here takes the plainest position, with milk and butter rather than pork. Its place in a low-cost collection is straightforward: two cheap garden crops, one pot, and a dish substantial enough to carry a meal.