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Lima Beans, Neufchatel Style
2 cups green Lima beans or 1 cup dried Lima beans, soaked in water overnight 1 teaspoon salt 1/4 cup butter 1 1/2 cups milk 2 egg-yolks Cook beans in boiling salted water until almost tender. Drain, remove skins and return to saucepan. Add fat, salt, and milk, and finish cooking. Just before serving, add slightly beaten egg-yolks diluted with a little milk.
A plain French treatment of Lima beans: cooked soft, enriched with butter and milk, then bound at the last moment with egg yolks. The whole dish turns on that final step.
- Never boil after the yolks go inAdd the diluted yolks off direct heat, or over the lowest possible flame, and stir until the sauce just thickens and coats the beans. A single boil curdles the yolks into grainy threads and the liquid separates.
- "Add fat" means the butterThe ingredient list gives 1/4 cup butter; the method calls it fat, a usage that turns up in period writing where another fat might be substituted. Use the butter.
- Fresh versus driedTwo cups shelled fresh or frozen green Limas need 15-20 minutes; a cup of dried beans, soaked overnight, will take 45-60 minutes and swells to roughly the same finished volume. Frozen baby Limas work and need no skinning.
- Skinning the beansDraining them hot and slipping off the skins is what gives the dish its smooth, almost creamed texture. Mature dried Limas have skins that stay tough and papery; with young fresh or frozen beans you can skip this, though the recipe does not.
- Salt appears twiceThe beans are cooked in salted water and the teaspoon of salt is then added with the milk. Salt the cooking water lightly and hold back some of the measured teaspoon, tasting at the end.
- "Finish cooking" in the milkThe recipe gives no time. A gentle simmer, roughly 10-15 minutes, should see the beans through; stir now and then, since milk and starch scorch on the bottom of the pan.
- YieldServes four as a side dish. It thickens as it stands and does not reheat well once the yolks are in, so make it to serve at once.