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Dried Lima Beans
Soak for several hours one pint of lima beans. Put in boiling water, let come to boil quickly, and simmer until done. Season with salt and butter. Black eyed peas are cooked the same way.
A bare-bones formula from a period when dried beans were a pantry staple and cooks needed no coaxing. A few numbers fill in what the original leaves out.
- Quantity and yieldOne pint of dried lima beans is about 14 oz, or 2 cups. Cooked they swell to two or three times their dry volume, feeding four to six as a side dish.
- The soak"Several hours" can be stretched to overnight, in about three times the beans' volume of cold water. Draining and cooking in fresh water is common modern advice, since some of the indigestible sugars leach out into the soaking water; the recipe itself does not say.
- Bring to a boil quickly, then drop the heatThis is the hinge. Large limas blow apart and go mealy at a rolling boil. Keep them at a bare simmer with the surface barely trembling and they hold their shape.
- TimingExpect 45 minutes to an hour and a quarter for soaked large limas, less for baby limas. Old beans that have sat in the cupboard for a year or more may never fully soften.
- SaltMrs. Wilson seasons at the end. Salting the cooking water from the start is now generally preferred and does no harm to the skins; either way, salt generously, as unsalted beans taste flat no matter how much butter goes in.
- Black-eyed peasThese are a cowpea, not a bean, and cook considerably faster — 25 to 40 minutes soaked, and they will tolerate no soak at all with extra time. Watch them closely at the end.
- Butter and beyondSalt and butter is the whole seasoning here. A ham hock, a bay leaf, or an onion halved and dropped in with the water fits the same tradition and costs nothing in effort.
Lima beans reached North American kitchens from South America, where the species Phaseolus lunatus was cultivated long before European contact, and the name is usually traced to Lima, Peru, though that derivation is traditional rather than documented. Mrs. Wilson's cookery writing dates from the years around the First World War, when dried limas and black-eyed peas were the sort of provision a household kept in bulk: cheap, shelf-stable, and rich in protein at a moment when meat was being conserved. The terseness of an entry like this one is characteristic — it assumes a reader who already knows the shape of the work and needs only the proportions and the order of operations.