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Baked Lima Beans
1 quart dried lima beans 1/4 cup butter 1 1/2 tablespoons salt 3 cups milk Soak the beans over night, and cook in water until tender. Drain, put in a baking dish, and add butter, milk and salt. Bake one and one-half hours slowly.
A plain casserole of limas baked in milk, from the era when "meat substitute" meant protein-dense beans rather than anything engineered. Two things need attention: the salt and the amount of beans.
- Slow oven"Bake ... slowly" in a book of this vintage points to what period writers called a slow oven, usually reckoned somewhere between 250F and 325F; the book itself gives no figure. At the low end the milk reduces and thickens over the full hour and a half; a hot oven risks curdling and scorching at the edges.
- A quart of dried beans is a lotMeasured dry, a quart is roughly 1 3/4 lb of large limas, which swell to something over 2 quarts cooked. This fills a 4-quart baking dish and serves ten to twelve. Halve everything for a household of four.
- The salt1 1/2 tablespoons is heavy even for that volume. Start with 2 teaspoons, taste the beans and the milk together, and add more at the table.
- Salting the cooking waterThe recipe says only "cook in water." Salt it lightly anyway; unsalted beans finished with surface salt taste hollow no matter how much goes into the dish.
- Cook until genuinely tender firstThe bake mainly sets and flavors the beans and will not rescue ones that go in underdone. Dried limas want 45 minutes to over an hour of simmering after an overnight soak, and older beans longer.
- Keep the beans coveredThree cups of milk should just about reach the top of the beans. Any that sit proud of the liquid go leathery, so either add a little more milk or press them down halfway through and let a skin form over the whole surface.
- ServingSubstantial enough to stand as a main dish rather than a side, though the page itself does not say so. Bread and a sharp pickled vegetable balance the richness.
Meatless cookbooks proliferated in the United States in the 1910s and 1920s, driven by wartime food conservation, Seventh-day Adventist and other vegetarian reform movements, and the newly popular idea that protein could be reckoned in grams from any source. Lima beans were an obvious candidate for meat substitution: cheap, shelf-stable, and higher in protein than most vegetables. The name is generally traced to the Peruvian capital, from which the beans were said to have been shipped in the nineteenth century, though the plant was domesticated in the Andes and in Mesoamerica millennia before that. Baking beans in milk and butter rather than the more familiar molasses and pork was a way of building richness without meat, and it points to how much of early meatless cookery leaned on dairy to do the work fat and salt pork had done before.