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Lima-Bean Salad
Lima-beans, salt, parsley, onion, French dressing, thyme, mint. Boil the lima-beans in water with a little salt, a bunch of parsley, and an onion until quite tender; drain. Add to the French dressing a little chopped thyme and mint. Mix it with the beans and serve quite cold.
A bare-bones formula of the kind common in turn-of-the-century salad books, where the writer assumes you know what French dressing is and how many beans a household eats. The one thing worth getting right is dressing the beans while they are still warm.
- QuantitiesNone are given. About 1 lb of shelled fresh or frozen limas (or 1 1/2 cups dried) with roughly 1/3 cup of dressing serves four to six as a side salad.
- French dressingIn this period the phrase usually means oil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked together, commonly around three parts oil to one of vinegar, though some period versions add mustard or paprika. It is not the sweetened orange-coloured bottled dressing sold under that name today.
- Which beansFresh shelled limas were assumed. Frozen limas or butter beans behave the same way; dried limas need soaking several hours first and will take 45 to 60 minutes to become tender.
- Cooking timeFresh limas are done in about 20 to 25 minutes at a gentle simmer; frozen ones, already blanched, take rather less. "Quite tender" is the goal, but push much past it and the skins slip and the beans collapse into paste.
- The aromaticsThe parsley bunch and the whole onion are flavouring for the cooking water only. Fish them out and discard them before dressing; they are not part of the salad.
- Dress warm, serve coldToss the drained beans with the dressing while they are still hot so they absorb it, then chill. Beans dressed straight from the refrigerator taste flat and the oil clings rather than penetrates.
- Herbs"A little" thyme and mint means about a teaspoon of each, chopped fine. Use fresh; dried mint in a cold oil dressing turns dusty and dominant.
- Seasoning at the endBoiled beans absorb a surprising amount of salt. Taste after chilling and correct with salt and a little more vinegar, as cold dulls acidity.
Lima beans are generally said to take their name from the Peruvian capital, the port from which crates of the large flat seeds were shipped, though the English name only came into common currency in the nineteenth century; the beans themselves reached Europe with Spanish contact in the sixteenth century, and they had been cultivated in the Andes and in Mesoamerica for thousands of years before that. By the time collections like this one were compiled, shelled limas were a summer garden staple in the eastern United States and were increasingly available canned, which is part of why they turn up so readily in salad books. The treatment here is thoroughly of its moment: boil a vegetable with an onion and a bunch of parsley for background flavour, dress it with plain oil and vinegar, add a whisper of green herbs, serve cold. Salad in this era meant almost any cooked vegetable given the French dressing treatment, not necessarily anything leafy.