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Green Lima Beans
Cover the shelled beans with boiling water; bring to a boil quickly; then let them simmer slowly until tender. Drain and add salt, pepper and butter or hot cream or cream sauce.
A bare-bones method from an era when cooks were trusted to judge doneness by taste. A few specifics fill in what the original leaves out.
- Salt at the end, as writtenSalt appears only after draining. It is often said that salted cooking water toughens the skins of older, starchier limas, though this is kitchen lore rather than settled fact. Season once the beans are drained and still steaming.
- How long is "until tender"Fresh young limas take 15 to 20 minutes at a bare simmer; large mature ones 25 to 35. Frozen baby limas, the practical modern substitute, need only 8 to 10 minutes. Test by eating one — it should be creamy through the centre with no chalkiness.
- Simmer, do not boilThe instruction to bring to a boil quickly and then drop to a slow simmer is the point of the method. A hard rolling boil tends to split skins and knock the beans about before the interiors soften.
- Raw limas need cookingLima beans contain cyanogenic compounds (much less so in common American varieties than tropical ones) and should not be eaten raw or barely warmed. Ordinary thorough simmering until tender, as here, deals with this; it is simply a reason not to cut the time short.
- Cream sauceThe period default is a thin white sauce — 1 tbsp butter, 1 tbsp flour, 1 cup milk, cooked a few minutes to lose the raw flour taste. "Hot cream" means exactly that: cream warmed and poured over, not reduced.
- QuantityNo yield is given. Reckon 1 lb of shelled beans (roughly 3 lb in the pod) to serve four as a side dish.
Lima beans reached American kitchens by way of the Andes and Central America, where Phaseolus lunatus was domesticated long before European contact; the name is generally traced to shipments out of the port of Lima. By the time Mrs. Fryer was compiling her loose-leaf pages in the early twentieth century, fresh shelled limas were an ordinary summer vegetable in the eastern United States, sold in the pod at market and shelled at home — a tedious enough job, and commercially frozen limas arrived a few decades later. The recipe's brevity is characteristic of the loose-leaf format.