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Lima Beans with Ham
Take three-quarters of a pound of lima beans, very tender young ones. Put them in boiling water for about five minutes to whiten them. Then put into a saucepan one heaping tablespoon of butter, some chopped parsley, and one small onion chopped up fine. When the onion is fried, add three ounces of raw ham, also chopped up. When the ham is fried put in the lima beans, and a little while before they are cooked add two or three tablespoons of stock. Serve with dice of fried bread.
A small, quick side dish built on the Italian pattern of a soffritto of butter, onion and parsley with cured ham. The whole thing takes about twenty minutes once the beans are shelled.
- "Raw ham" means prosciutto crudoThis is dry-cured, ready-to-eat ham, not uncooked pork. Three ounces of prosciutto crudo, pancetta or speck, cut in small dice rather than shaved slices, is what the recipe wants; it will be salty enough that no extra salt is needed until the end.
- Which beanThe recipe names lima beans, and three-quarters of a pound is most likely the shelled weight of tender young ones, though the text does not say so. Fresh shelled beans of other kinds, favas among them, are dressed this way in Italian kitchens and behave much the same. Frozen baby limas work and need no blanching, only thawing.
- "To whiten them"Five minutes in boiling water sets the colour and loosens the skins of very young beans. Older or larger beans need longer, closer to eight to ten minutes, and their skins are worth slipping off, since they turn papery in the pan.
- The hinge: keep the heat lowThe onion should soften and turn pale gold without browning, and the ham should just render and firm up, not crisp. Cured ham held over high heat in butter goes hard and aggressively salty, which overwhelms a delicate bean.
- Stock at the end, not the startTwo or three tablespoons is deliberately little. It is there to gloss the beans and pick up the pan, not to stew them; add it in the last few minutes and let it nearly cook away.
- Total pan timeBlanched young beans need only five to eight minutes in the butter and ham to finish. Judge by a bean crushing easily against the roof of the mouth; overcooked limas collapse into mush.
- Dice of fried breadCubes of good bread fried in butter or oil until golden, drained, and scattered on at the table. Fry them separately and add at the last moment or they soften.
- YieldServes three or four as a vegetable course, two if it is the main part of a light lunch.
Simple Italian Cookery (1912) was written by Antonia Isola, the pen name of Mabel Earl McGinnis, for American readers who, it is often said, had tasted Italian food abroad or in immigrant restaurants and had no idea how to reproduce it. Dishes like this one show the book's method plainly: a vegetable is not boiled and buttered but built on a base of chopped onion, parsley and cured pork, then moistened with a spoonful of stock -- the everyday Italian habit of treating vegetables as a course in their own right rather than an accompaniment. The instruction to use "raw ham" is a literal rendering of prosciutto crudo, a phrase that would probably have puzzled many of her first readers, since dry-cured ham is generally thought to have been difficult to buy outside Italian neighbourhood groceries. Fresh shelled beans dressed this way are still standard in central and southern Italy, most often with fava beans in spring, and the fried bread croutons are the same thrift that turns yesterday's loaf into a garnish.