Home › Seven Weeks' Menus › Puree of Lima Beans
Puree of Lima Beans
1 pint lima beans 6 pints cold water 2 teaspoons salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper Few grains cayenne 1 tablespoon shortening 1 tablespoon flour 3 small tomatoes Soak beans over night if dry; in the morning, drain and add cold water. Cook until soft, rub through a sieve, add salt, pepper and cayenne. Reheat soup, melt shortening, add flour, cook together until perfectly smooth, add one cup of soup, stirring all the time. Add to the soup and cook three minutes. Soup stock or the liquid of a can of tomatoes may be used to cook the beans in place of the water. Serves 8.
A plain bean puree thickened with a roux, from the era when a sieve did the work of a blender. The proportions are generous with water, so expect to judge the final thickness yourself.
- A pint of beansDried beans were measured by volume, not weight: a pint is 2 cups, roughly 12-14 oz of dried limas. Fresh or frozen limas can be used in the same volume, in which case skip the soaking and cook about 25 minutes.
- Six pints of waterThat is 12 cups, which over the stated eight servings comes to about a cup and a half each, so the soup is meant to be thin. Start with 8 cups if you want a thicker puree, and add more only if it is too stiff.
- ShorteningIn cookbooks of this period the word means lard or a canned vegetable shortening such as Crisco. Butter or a neutral oil gives much the same result in a soup this size.
- The roux is the hingeCook the flour and fat until smooth but not browned, then slacken it with a cup of the hot soup before it goes back into the pot. Adding dry roux straight to a large volume of puree is how you get lumps that no amount of stirring will clear.
- SievingRubbing the hot beans through a sieve leaves the skins behind, which is the point of the step. A food mill with a fine plate is the closest modern equivalent; a blender will also work, though it breaks the skins into the puree rather than removing them.
- Cayenne"Few grains" is a standard measure in cookbooks of this period, meaning a very small pinch, well under an eighth of a teaspoon. It is there for warmth in the finish rather than noticeable heat.
- The tomato optionThe recipe's suggestion of soup stock or the liquid from a can of tomatoes in place of the water is worth taking: the tomato liquid adds acidity, the stock savour.
- YieldThe recipe says it serves 8, which suits a first course; fewer if you serve it as a main. Being thickened with flour, it will stiffen on standing and may need thinning with water or stock the next day.
Puree soups like this one filled a specific slot in early twentieth-century menu planning: cheap, filling, made from a shelf staple, and refined enough by way of the sieve to open a formal dinner. Lima beans, usually said to take their name from Lima in Peru, were long grown throughout the Americas and were among the more widely available dried legumes in the United States by this date, sold in both the large "Fordhook" type and the smaller baby lima. The roux finish, rather than the cream or egg yolk of some earlier recipes, reads as an economy: flour and shortening cost a fraction of what cream did.