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Succotash
1 pt. Butterbeans. 1/2 cup cream. 4 ears corn. 1 tablespoon butter. Salt and pepper to taste.
Boil beans and corn until tender; cut corn from ear and mix with beans; stir in cream, salt, pepper and butter.
A four-line recipe that assumes you already know how long fresh shell beans take. The only real decisions are the bean and the point at which the corn goes in.
- ButterbeansFresh or frozen baby lima beans are the direct substitute; a pint measures roughly 10-12 oz shelled. Dried limas will work but need soaking and 45-60 minutes of simmering, which changes the character of the dish considerably.
- Cook the corn separately and brieflyThe instruction to boil beans and corn until tender reads as though both go in together, but the beans want 20-25 minutes and the corn 3-5. Boil the beans first, add the ears for the last few minutes, or cook them in separate pots.
- Cutting corn from the cobStand the cooled ear upright in a wide bowl and run a knife down it, then scrape the cob with the back of the blade to release the milky pulp. That scraping adds body to the cream. Four ears give roughly 2 to 3 cups of kernels, depending on size.
- CreamWhat was sold as cream in the early twentieth century varied a good deal in fat, from light table cream to something approaching today's heavy cream. Heavy cream reduces to a coating consistency in a few minutes over low heat; half-and-half will stay thin and may break if pushed to a boil.
- Finish off the heatStir the butter in last, with the pan off the burner, so it emulsifies rather than pooling. Salt at the end, as the recipe directs.
- YieldServes four as a side dish. It does not hold well; the corn firms up and the cream separates on reheating.
Succotash comes from a Narragansett word, generally given as msickquatash, meaning boiled whole kernels of corn, and the dish is one of the clearest survivals of Indigenous cooking in the American household repertoire. Corn and beans were grown together in the same fields long before European settlement, and eaten together as well, the combination supplying between them a fuller range of protein than either alone. By Mrs. Wilson's day the dish had been thoroughly domesticated into New England and Mid-Atlantic home cooking, usually enriched with butter and cream in a way the original was not. Wilson wrote for wartime and post-war Philadelphia housekeepers and favored short, unfussy vegetable recipes like this one, built around whatever came in from the garden in high summer, when shell beans and sweet corn overlap for only a few weeks.