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Lima Beans-Fresh
Wash the beans and cover with water. Add a small piece of salt pork or butter and boil for ten minutes; season and place in cooker for two hours or more. Season to taste with salt and pepper.
A fireless-cooker recipe: the food is brought to a full boil on the stove, then transferred to an insulated box to finish on stored heat. Everything about the method depends on the beans going into the cooker boiling hot.
- What a fireless cooker isAn insulated wooden or metal box, often with soapstone or iron discs heated in the fire, that holds a hot pot near cooking temperature for hours. The modern equivalent is a slow cooker set to high or a heavy lidded pot in a 200-225F oven; a thermal cooker works the same way as the original.
- Preheat the pot, not just the beansThe whole point is thermal mass. Use the smallest pot that holds the beans, fill it well up, and get it to a rolling boil before it goes in the box, or the temperature falls too fast to finish the cooking.
- Fresh lima beansShelled fresh limas are hard to find outside late summer farm stands. Frozen baby limas are the closest substitute and need far less time: about 15-20 minutes at a simmer. Dried limas are a different ingredient and want soaking plus an hour or more.
- Two hours is for fresh shell beansFresh limas straight from the pod are done in 20-30 minutes of ordinary simmering. The two hours here is the cost of cooking with falling heat rather than a flame, not an indication of how tough the bean is.
- Salt porkA two-inch cube of salt pork, or a thick slice of bacon, though bacon adds smoke the original would not have had. Salt pork is salty enough that it is worth holding back on added salt until the beans come out of the cooker.
- Water level"Cover with water" means barely covered. There is very little evaporation from a closed pot in an insulated box, so extra water leaves you draining off much of the flavour at the end.
Fireless cookery had a real vogue in American kitchens between about 1905 and the 1920s. The idea is old and European in origin, the Norwegian hay box being the commonly cited ancestor: food is boiled briefly, then buried in insulation so that its own retained heat completes the cooking. It appealed for the same reasons a slow cooker does now, plus one that mattered more then, namely fuel. A coal or wood range had to be stoked and watched, and a cook who could get dinner boiling before church and find it done afterwards saved both. Lima beans, named for the Peruvian capital and grown in the Andes for millennia before reaching North America, were a staple summer shell bean in the eastern United States and turn up throughout period cookbooks succotashed, buttered, or, as here, simply simmered with a piece of pork.