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Butter Beans
Shell and let stand in cold water for awhile. Cover with boiling salted water. Cook one hour. Serve with cream sauce or drawn butter. Can be pressed through potato ricer, add a little cream, butter, pepper and salt. Put in pan, sprinkle with buttered bread crumbs and run in stove to season.
A brief note rather than a formal recipe: fresh shelled lima beans, boiled and then either sauced or mashed and browned. The timing belongs to an era of larger, starchier field beans.
- What butter beans areIn American usage of this period, butter bean generally means the lima bean, either the large flat kind or the smaller sort, shelled fresh from the pod. Frozen limas are the closest modern equivalent; dried limas need soaking and behave differently.
- The hour is too longYoung fresh or frozen limas are tender in 15 to 25 minutes. Mature, large field limas may want 40 minutes. Test one rather than watching the clock; a full hour turns them to paste unless you intend to rice them anyway.
- The cold-water soakStanding freshly shelled beans in cold water keeps them plump and rinses off bits of pod. It does nothing for frozen beans, which can go straight into the pot.
- Salted boiling waterRoughly a teaspoon of salt per quart. The recipe adds the beans to water already at a boil rather than bringing them up slowly from cold.
- Drawn butterNot simply melted butter but the period's basic butter sauce: butter cooked briefly with flour, thinned with hot water or bean liquor, seasoned. Cream sauce is the same idea made with milk or cream.
- "Run in stove to season"This means a short spell in a hot oven, only long enough to brown the crumbs and set the top. The beans are already fully cooked, so the time is short; watch the crumbs rather than the clock.
- RicingA potato ricer works, but a food mill or a coarse mash gives a better texture; a food processor will make the puree gluey.
- YieldReckon about 1 lb shelled beans, roughly 3 cups, for four as a side dish.