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Succotash
To a pint of corn cooked off the cob add a pint of cooked and creamed Lima beans. 6 ears corn 1 cup hot milk 1/4 teaspoon salt
A fragment of a recipe rather than a full method: the first sentence gives the ratio, the trailing list gives quantities for the corn side only. Both halves need filling in.
- The ratio is the recipeEqual volumes of cut corn and cooked lima beans, bound with the hot milk. Everything else here is detail.
- Six ears makes about a pintThe recipe sets six ears against the pint of corn it calls for, though modern ears are large and six may well give more than 2 cups of kernels; cut and measure. Frozen corn works at the same volume.
- "Cooked off the cob"Boil or steam the ears briefly, then strip the kernels with a knife held against the cob; scraping the cob afterward with the back of the blade releases the milky starch, which thickens the dish.
- Lima beansFresh green limas, the likely intention, are now hard to find; frozen baby limas are the practical substitute. Dried limas need soaking and simmering to tenderness first, and give a mealier, heavier result.
- "Creamed" hereMost likely the beans are simply dressed with the hot milk rather than bound in a thick white sauce, though the word could carry either sense at the time. It is unclear whether the 1 cup hot milk and 1/4 teaspoon salt are meant for the corn alone or for the whole panful; butter is not called for at all.
- Don't boil it downOnce the milk goes in, keep the pan at a bare simmer for two or three minutes just to marry the two vegetables. Hard boiling curdles the milk and turns the corn starchy and dull.
- YieldAbout a quart of finished succotash, serving four as a side dish.
Succotash comes from the Narragansett msickquatash, roughly "boiled whole kernels of corn," and the pairing of corn with beans is one of the oldest food combinations in North America, tied to the practice of growing the two together along with squash. English colonists took up the dish early and by the nineteenth century it had settled into New England household cookery as a summer vegetable made from whatever came out of the garden at the same moment; canned and frozen versions later made it a year-round side.