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Lima Beans
Shell 1 quart of beans and cook in boiling water from one to one and one-half hours, letting them simmer most of the time and adding salt the last half hour of cooking. Cook in just enough water to cover them that there may be none to drain off when the beans are cooked. Season with 2 tablespoons of butter and a teaspoon of salt, or a white sauce for vegetables may be used.
A plain vegetable dish from a wartime meat-substitute chapter, and the only thing that really needs revisiting is the cooking time.
- The timing is the hingeOne to one and a half hours will reduce fresh shelled limas to mush. Young fresh beans need 20 to 30 minutes at a bare simmer; older, starchier ones may want 40. The long time in the original seems to assume large, mature, late-season beans.
- A quart of beans in the podA quart of beans -- "Shell 1 quart of beans" is ambiguous: it may mean a quart measured after shelling, or a quart of pods to be shelled. Read as shelled, a quart is roughly 1 1/2 lb and serves about six, and would take something like 3 lb of pods. Frozen baby limas can stand in, roughly 2 lb, cooking in 10 to 15 minutes.
- Salting lateAdding salt only in the last half hour follows the old belief that early salt toughens skins. Modern practice is the opposite: salt the water from the start for better-seasoned beans and no measurable toughening. Note that the recipe gives no quantity for the salt added during cooking, so the teaspoon at the end may be that same salt rather than a further addition.
- Just enough waterThe recipe's stated reason for barely covering the beans is that there should be no cooking water to drain off. In practice the starch that leaches out also thickens the little remaining liquid with the butter. Keep a lid on and add hot water by the spoonful if the pan threatens to go dry.
- White sauce for vegetablesIn books of this period that means a thin bechamel: about 1 tablespoon butter and 1 tablespoon flour to a cup of milk, seasoned with salt and a little pepper. It is thinner than the sauce used for creaming meat or binding croquettes.
- As a meat substituteTo make this the protein of a meal rather than a side, a common period approach was to add a starch and a cheese or egg element — the beans with white sauce over toast, or baked with buttered crumbs. On its own a serving supplies useful protein but not enough to carry a dinner.
Lima beans reached American and European kitchens from South and Central America, and the name is generally traced to the Peruvian capital, from which the beans were shipped in the colonial trade; the large flat "Lima" and the smaller "sieva" or baby type are both forms of Phaseolus lunatus. Their appearance in a meat-substitute chapter is characteristic of cookbooks published around the First World War, when meatless days were promoted as a patriotic and economic measure and compilers reached for the legumes — beans, peas, lentils, peanuts — as the cheapest available protein. Fresh shell beans were then a genuinely seasonal item, bought in the pod and shelled at the kitchen table, which is why the recipe measures them by the quart rather than the pound and why it assumes a range of maturity and therefore a range of cooking times.