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Baked Dried Lima Beans
1 cup dried lima beans 1 small onion 1 pimiento 3 tablespoons shortening 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon paprika Boiling water Soak the lima beans in one quart of cold water for several hours or over night. Drain off the water. Put the beans in an earthenware dish or covered casserole. Saute the thinly sliced onion and the pimiento, cut in small pieces, in the shortening for 5 minutes. Add to the beans with the salt, paprika and enough boiling water to cover the beans. Bake slowly until the beans are soft-about 2 hours. Add more water as it is needed. If the beans are cooked in boiling water, after soaking in the cold water, they may be baked in one hour. Serves 6.
A plain baked bean dish that depends on two things: a genuinely low oven and enough liquid in the pot throughout. Everything else is seasoning.
- "Bake slowly"No temperature is given; a low oven of around 300F suits the stated two hours for a cup of soaked limas. A hotter oven risks the skins breaking up before the centres soften.
- Keep them covered in liquidThe hinge of the recipe is the instruction to add more water as needed. Limas exposed above the water line dry into leathery caps. Check every 30 to 40 minutes and top up with boiling water so the oven temperature does not drop.
- The one-hour shortcutThe final sentence is worth taking: cook the soaked beans in boiling water first, then bake with the onion, pimiento and enough liquid to cover. The recipe allows one hour of baking in that case.
- PimientoA jar of whole roasted pimientos or piquillo peppers; one pepper is roughly 2 tablespoons chopped. Drain well before it goes into the fat or it will spit.
- ShorteningIn a book of this period this would most likely be lard or a vegetable shortening; butter would also serve. Three tablespoons for one cup of dry beans is generous by modern taste; two is ample, and bacon fat suits the paprika.
- Salt and old beansHalf a teaspoon of salt with a quart of water is a light hand. Salting early does not prevent beans softening, but beans more than a year old may never soften at all — buy from a shop with turnover.
- Dish and yieldA 1 1/2-quart lidded casserole or bean pot. One cup of dried limas swells to about three cups cooked, so the stated six servings means a side dish, not a main.