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Lima Beans
It is best to buy beans in the pods and shell just before using. Rinse in cold water. Put into saucepan; cover with boiling water and boil until tender. Drain and to each quart of beans add 1 teaspoon salt, a pinch of pepper, and 1 tablespoon butter.
A bare-bones method from a period when fresh shell beans were a summer staple and cooks needed no more than a reminder. A few numbers fill in what the original leaves out.
- How many podsLima pods yield roughly a third of their weight in beans, so a quart of shelled beans takes several pounds of pods rather than two. A quart serves four to six as a side.
- Shell lateThe instruction to shell just before cooking is the real point of the recipe. Shelled limas dry at the cut end and are generally reckoned to lose sweetness fairly quickly, which may be part of why pods were sold intact.
- Boiling timeYoung fresh limas need 15 to 20 minutes at a bare boil; large mature ones, 25 to 30. Test by eating one rather than watching the clock, since maturity varies more than size suggests.
- Boil uncoveredRaw lima beans contain small amounts of a cyanogenic compound; boiling in plenty of water, uncovered so the volatile part can escape, is the usual advice. Note that the recipe's 'cover with boiling water' refers to the water, not to a lid. Do not eat them raw or barely warmed.
- Salt at the endThe recipe salts after draining. Salting the cooking water lightly instead does no harm. A teaspoon per quart is modest; taste and adjust.
- If using dried or frozenDried limas need soaking and an hour or more of simmering, and the recipe does not cover them. Frozen baby limas go straight into boiling water for 8 to 10 minutes and take the same butter and pepper finish.
- The butterA tablespoon to a quart is thin by current taste. Two to three tablespoons, tossed with the beans while they are still steaming so it clings, suits most modern palates better.
The lima bean, Phaseolus lunatus, is a New World domesticate with a long history in Peru, and the name is generally traced to the port of Lima, from which the beans were shipped north in crates so labelled. In the American South the same bean goes by butter bean, usually meaning the smaller, paler sieva type, while the big flat green ones were often called Fordhooks after the seed-house variety that popularised them. That this entry in a cookbook assumes fresh beans in the pod tells you something about the period: home canning and early commercial freezing existed, but the summer vegetable chapter of a general cookbook still took the shelling bowl for granted, and the whole recipe amounts to boil, drain, butter.