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Lima Beans-Purée
1 cup dried beans 2 cups water 1 slice onion 1 stalk celery 1 teaspoon salt Dash of pepper 2 tablespoons butter Soak the beans over night. Drain; add fresh water and a pinch of soda. Boil fifteen minutes; add onion and celery cut into small pieces; place in cooker over night. Rub through sieve; add butter, salt and pepper, and serve hot.
A fireless cooker is an insulated box: food is brought to a boil on the stove, then sealed in with soapstone discs or simply packed in hay so it finishes on stored heat. The method translates cleanly to a slow cooker or a heavy covered pot, with one caveat about the overnight hold.
- The overnight hold is the weak pointAn insulated box coasts downward from boiling over several hours, and dried beans held for long stretches at warm-but-not-hot temperatures are a known medium for Bacillus cereus. Cook them in a slow cooker on low, or simmer them covered for an hour or two on the stove, rather than letting a box cool with the beans inside.
- The pinch of sodaBaking soda raises the pH and softens bean skins fast, which is why old recipes lean on it. It also flattens the flavor and degrades thiamine, and too much turns limas to slime. A scant eighth-teaspoon per quart is the outside limit; with a proper overnight soak you can leave it out entirely.
- Which limaLarge dried limas (butter beans) commonly take somewhere between three quarters of an hour and an hour and a half at a simmer once soaked, and baby limas can be quicker, depending on how old the beans are. Either works, but baby limas purée smoother and are less prone to blowing their skins.
- Two cups of water is not enoughTwo cups of water is not enough for an open pot -- the recipe lists two cups but does not say how much fresh water to add after draining. In an open pot the beans want water covering them by two inches, topped up as needed, with the cooking liquid saved to thin the purée.
- "Rub through a sieve"A food mill with the medium plate does this in a minute and leaves the tough skins behind, which a blender will not. A blender or immersion blender gives a smoother, slightly gluier result; pass it through a sieve afterward if you want the texture the book intends.
- Salt timingThe teaspoon of salt goes in at the end here, and there is no reason to change that for flavor, though salting the cooking water does not toughen beans as folk wisdom claims. Season the finished purée to taste, since dried beans absorb salt unpredictably.
- Yield and servingOne cup of dried beans makes roughly two to two and a half cups of purée, enough for three or four as a side dish. It is a vegetable purée, not a soup; loosen it with cooking liquid or hot milk if it stiffens as it stands, and serve it hot, as the recipe insists, because it sets up quickly.
Fireless cookery was a genuine movement in American kitchens between about 1905 and the early 1920s, promoted in dedicated manuals, in extension bulletins, and in cookbooks like this one. The principle is old — the hay box, in which a boiling pot is buried in insulation and left to finish on its own heat, is generally traced to Northern European rural practice — but it was taken up by American home economists as a fuel-saving and labor-saving device, and again with some urgency during the First World War, when coal and gas conservation was a patriotic matter. Dried legumes were the ideal case for it: they need long, gentle, unattended heat and nothing else, and a cook could set beans in the box after supper and find them done at breakfast. The purée itself belongs to the same period's taste for smooth, sieved vegetable dishes finished with butter, a domesticated echo of French kitchen practice that turns up throughout early twentieth-century American cookbooks.