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Indian Succotash
Boil until soft, 1 pint beans, season with salt and pepper, and add corn from 1/2 dozen ears of corn. Allow this to cook together for about ten minutes. Add butter and 1 tsp. of sugar and a little more salt and pepper if necessary. This mixture should be quite thick. Then add about a cup of hot milk or cream. If allowed to stand on the back of the stove for a while when done, the flavor will be like that made by the Mohegan Indians today.
— Mrs. M. Howard Ferguson
A simple two-ingredient dish whose success depends almost entirely on what kind of bean you use and how long you let it rest. Read the bean note first.
- What "1 pint beans" meansMeasured by volume, not weight, and the original does not say dried or fresh. Fresh shell beans — cranberry, horticultural or young lima, shelled from the pod — suit the brief cooking here, and were common in succotash of this period, though dried beans were used as well. If you use dried beans, soak and simmer them separately until tender before the recipe begins; "boil until soft" would otherwise take an hour or more, not the brief cooking the timings imply.
- Corn from half a dozen earsSix ears of sweet corn yield roughly 3 to 4 cups of kernels, so the finished dish carries rather more corn than beans by volume. Cut the kernels off and scrape the cobs with the back of the knife; the starchy milk that comes out is what thickens the pot.
- Ten minutes is rightModern sweet corn varieties are sweeter and more tender than those grown a century ago and need very little heat. Ten minutes with the beans is enough; longer and the kernels toughen and lose their sweetness.
- Keep it thick before the milkThe instruction that the mixture "should be quite thick" is the hinge. Cook off the bean liquor until the pot is nearly dry, then add the hot cup of milk or cream. Add it to a watery pot and you get corn soup.
- Heat the milk firstCold dairy dropped into a hot starchy pot can curdle and will stall the cooking. Warm it separately, and once it goes in keep the pan below a simmer.
- The rest at the back of the stoveThis is not idle instruction; a spell of very low residual heat lets the starch swell and the corn and bean flavors marry. On a modern range, use the lowest setting or a very low oven, covered, and stir once or twice.
- Butter and sugarNo quantity is given for the butter; 2 to 3 tablespoons suits this volume. The teaspoon of sugar likely compensates for older, starchier corn and can be left out entirely with good summer corn.
- YieldAbout six to eight side servings, or four as a supper dish with bread.
Succotash is one of the small handful of English words taken directly from Narragansett — msickquatash, usually glossed as boiled whole kernels of corn — and the dish itself, corn and beans cooked together, belongs to the same agricultural logic that planted the two crops in one hill. Mrs. Ferguson's appeal to "the Mohegan Indians today" is worth noting: the Mohegan community in southeastern Connecticut has kept an annual Green Corn festival and its own succotash tradition into the present, and New England cooks are often said to have invoked Native authority to certify a recipe as authentic, whether or not they had eaten it at a Mohegan table. Compiled community cookbooks like this one, made up of members' contributions, are full of such attributions; they tell you as much about how New Englanders imagined their regional cooking as about the dish. The long rest at the back of the stove, though, is a genuinely old technique, dating from an era when a hearth or wood range typically had a cooling corner and no one hurried a pot of beans.