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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.