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Lima Beans Salad
2 quarts of cooked lima or butter beans. A small onion. A little chopped parsley. The hollandaise salad cream of the preceding receipt. Mince the onion small. Mix all the ingredients together by pouring from one bowl to another, except the parsley, which chop and sprinkle over the top. And my Italian friend looked on dubiously when he first saw me preparing to pour a mayonaise over lima beans, and afterwards over corn, and green peas, and string beans, as if he thought in Italian, "To what base uses may we come, Horatio!" "But," I said, "you make the salade de legumes, which is--excuse me--something of a vegetable hash; these are at least simple and from their looks inviting. And you cut also beets in dice and mix in, and they stain the cut potatoes, and the red juice mingles with the pale yellow of the mayonaise and makes an uneatable color." He put on his studying cap and presently adopted the butter beans salad, as well as the others, but he did not give up the cut beets in salad cream. Mere matters of fancy perhaps--but yet we presently discover which things are popular.
Lima beans, so generally esteemed, in their green state have but a very short season. Contrary to the general rule, the dried are better than the canned beans for winter use.
The secret of cooking all dried beans soft is in the following: Wash and pick them over carefully and put them on in plenty of cold water with a rounding teaspoonful of soda for every two pounds of beans. Boil about 2 or 3 hours till they begin to be soft. Then pour them suddenly into a colander to drain, turn them back in the boiler and put in enough fresh cold water to cover them.
Set them to boil again--in half an hour more they will be thoroughly cooked. The sudden adding of cold water to the hot beans causes the skin to crack, after which they finish cooking easily. There is no excuse for the stupidity of the mule-driving cooks told of in Scribner's Monthly (Rocky Mountain Cookery,) who carry the beans partly cooked in their kettles and recook them for three successive days in the vain attempt to make them soft. Our lima beans are comparatively easy, but the most refractory sample of navy beans can be reduced in five hours by the above method even at an elevation of 11,000 feet.
A dressed cold vegetable salad from a hotel cook's repertoire, plus a long aside on getting dried beans soft. Both halves are usable, with adjustments.
- Scale and yieldTwo quarts of cooked beans is a banquet quantity — roughly 10 to 14 side servings. For a household, quarter it: about 2 cups cooked beans, a tablespoon of minced onion, and a few tablespoons of dressing.
- Dried to cookedTwo quarts cooked beans works out to somewhere around 2 lb of dried limas (about 4 1/2 to 5 cups). Canned or frozen butter beans work; drain and rinse well before dressing.
- The "hollandaise salad cream"Not hollandaise in the modern sense. It is the dressing given in the recipe immediately preceding this one, and the author himself calls it a mayonaise a few lines later. Any good thick mayonnaise, slackened enough to pour, stands in.
- Soda in the cooking waterA rounding teaspoon per 2 lb is more than needed. Modern practice is 1/8 to 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda per pound; larger amounts turn the beans slimy, give a soapy taste, and destroy much of the thiamine. The alkali softens pectin in the skins, which is probably doing more of the work here than the cold-water shock the author credits.
- Cooking timeTwo to three hours is for unsoaked beans. Soaked overnight, limas are tender in 45 to 60 minutes at a bare simmer. The cold-water shock does crack skins, but do not let a rolling boil break the beans up -- dressed salad wants them whole.
- Dress while warmBeans absorb dressing far better just off the heat than cold from the refrigerator. Mix warm, then chill; add the parsley just before serving so it stays green.
- Pour from bowl to bowlThis is not quaintness. Tipping the beans between two bowls coats them without the stirring that would mash them, and it is still the best way to dress any cooked bean or potato salad.
- On the beetsHis objection holds. Diced beets bleed into a pale dressing within minutes; if you want them, dress them separately and add at the table.
Jessup Whitehead was a Chicago hotel cook and trade writer, and this page shows both sides of him — a working recipe and an argument with a colleague. The dispute is real to the period: French and Italian professional cooking had the composed salade de légumes, a dice of mixed vegetables bound in mayonnaise, while American hotels of the 1880s and 1890s were serving single-vegetable salads of limas, corn, peas or string beans, plainer and cheaper to prep in volume. Lima and butter beans (both Phaseolus lunatus, the names used loosely and interchangeably then as now) had a very short green season before commercial freezing, which is why the recipe pivots into a treatise on dried beans. The reference to "Rocky Mountain Cookery" in Scribner's Monthly and to cooking at 11,000 feet reflects a genuine problem for camp and railroad cooks: water boils at about 192F at that elevation, and beans soften only very slowly.