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Butter Bean Soup
1/2 pound butter beans 1 quart cold water 4 ounces Spanish onions 4 ounces turnips 3 ounces carrots 2 stalks celery 1/2 ounce butter 1/2 ounce flour 1/2 pint milk Salt and pepper Wash the beans, and soak them all night in the water. Put them into a saucepan, and when boiling, add the other vegetables and one-half teaspoon salt. Cook until the beans are tender--about two hours. Remove the carrot, turnip, onion and celery, and rub the beans through a sieve. Melt the butter, mix the flour, add the milk, and cook for ten minutes. Add the beans; bring to boiling point. Season, and serve.
A plain dried-bean pur e finished with a thin white sauce. The proportions are given in a mix of weights and liquid measures typical of British-influenced American cookbooks of the period.
- Butter beansThese are dried lima beans (Phaseolus lunatus); the half pound is about 1 1/4 cups. Large dried limas give the mildest, starchiest result; baby limas work and cook faster.
- Weights to cups4 oz onion is a small-to-medium onion, 4 oz turnip one small turnip, 3 oz carrot one medium-to-large. The 1/2 oz butter is about a tablespoon; the 1/2 oz flour closer to two. The 1/2 pint of milk is one cup if the measure is American, about 1 1/4 cups if it is imperial.
- The soaking waterThe quart of cold water the beans soaked in is the cooking liquid — the recipe does not tell you to drain it, and the starch in it carries the body of the soup. Keep it.
- Cooking timeTwo hours is right for old-fashioned stovetop simmering, but modern dried limas soaked overnight are usually tender in 45 to 60 minutes. Test rather than clock-watch; beans that have sat in a pantry for years may need the full two hours or longer.
- Salt timingThe half teaspoon added at the start is fine, but hold the rest until the end. The recipe's final seasoning step matters because the milk and the reduction both concentrate what is already there.
- SievingA food mill fitted with the medium plate does this work in a minute and leaves the skins behind, which a blender will not. If you use a blender, pass the pur e through a sieve afterward or the soup will be gritty with hulls.
- The white sauceMelt the butter, stir in the flour and let it cook a minute before the milk goes in, or the soup tastes of raw flour. The ten minutes of cooking is for the sauce alone, over low heat, stirring — it will scorch on a modern high-output burner.
- FinishingOnce the bean puree and milk sauce are combined, bring it just to a boil and no further, as the recipe says. Held at a hard boil the milk is liable to catch and separate.
- YieldRoughly a quart to a quart and a quarter, serving four as a first course. The soup thickens considerably as it stands; thin with hot water or milk when reheating.
Butter bean is the British and Southern name for the lima bean, a New World legume domesticated in the Americas long before European contact; the name "lima" is generally traced to Lima, Peru. Large dried butter beans were a cheap and widely available staple on both sides of the Atlantic, which is part of why they turn up so often in meatless cookery, and soup chapters of the period lean heavily on pulses thickened with a flour-and-milk liaison. The technique here -- vegetables simmered with the beans for flavour and then lifted out before sieving -- treats the aromatics as seasoning rather than substance.