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Cream of Lima Bean Soup
1 cup lima beans 1 quart water 2 cup milk 1 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon flour 1 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon onion salt Soak the beans in cold water over night. Cook in a quart of boiling water. Let it simmer until the beans are perfectly tender; then press through a colander. Make a white sauce of the milk, flour, butter and salt. Add the bean puree and enough water to make one quart of soup. Add the alt and onion just before serving.
A plain thickened puree soup that depends entirely on cooking the beans to complete softness before they meet the milk. Two typographical slips in the original are worth sorting out before you start.
- The typos"2 cup milk" means 2 cups, and "Add the alt and onion just before serving" means the salt and the onion salt. Only one teaspoon of salt is listed, so the salt in the white sauce and the salt at the finish are probably meant to be the same measure; season lightly during cooking and correct at the end.
- Which limasThese are dried limas, not fresh or frozen, since they are soaked overnight. One cup dried gives roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups cooked, enough for a quart of soup. Large butter beans and small baby limas both work; the baby ones cook faster and sieve more easily.
- Cooking timeAfter an overnight soak, simmer 45 minutes to 1 1/4 hours depending on the age of the beans. "Perfectly tender" is not an exaggeration here: any bean that still has structure will refuse to go through the sieve and leave the soup grainy.
- Pressing through a colanderA food mill or a blender does the same work faster; if you blend, still pass the puree through a sieve to catch the skins, which do not break down.
- The white sauceOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to two cups milk is a thin sauce, deliberately so, since the bean puree does most of the thickening. Cook the flour in the butter a minute before adding the milk, and add the puree off a hard boil to avoid scorching the milk.
- Onion saltA blend of salt and dried onion. If you have none, use 1/8 teaspoon salt plus a pinch of onion powder, or simmer a slice of onion in the milk and remove it.
- YieldOne quart, which is four modest first-course servings or two as a main dish with bread.
Limas were a good candidate for a soup of this kind because they were cheap, kept dry indefinitely, and cook to a smooth starchy puree without the assertive flavor of a navy or field bean. The construction here, a vegetable puree let down with thin bechamel, is the standard "cream of" formula of the American cooking-school tradition, applied to whatever the pantry held.