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Cream of Lima Bean Soup
1 cup dried lima beans 3 pints cold water 2 slices onion 4 slices carrot 1 cup cream or milk 4 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 1 teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon pepper Soak beans over night; in the morning drain and add cold water; cook until soft, and rub through a sieve. Cut vegetables in small cubes, and cook five minutes in half the butter; remove vegetables, add flour, salt, and pepper, and stir into boiling soup. Add cream, reheat, strain, and add remaining butter in small pieces. 6 artichokes
A straightforward puréed bean soup from Farmer's chapter of stockless soups, thickened with a butter-flour roux stirred directly into the hot purée. Two things in the printed text need sorting out before you start.
- On the pepperThe printed page was checked and the pepper reads half a teaspoon, as our text now gives. That is on the assertive side for a mild bean puree, so season to taste; a scant quarter teaspoon of white pepper is plenty for most palates.
- The stray artichokes"6 artichokes" at the end belongs to the next recipe in the book and has nothing to do with this soup. Ignore it.
- Bean quantity and timingOne cup of dried limas soaked overnight cooks in 45 minutes to an hour and a quarter, depending on age. Three pints of water is generous; expect a thin purée, which is what the roux is for. Old beans that refuse to soften are not worth waiting on — start again with a fresher bag.
- Sieve versus blender"Rub through a sieve" was the only option in 1896. A blender or immersion blender gets there faster, but still pass the purée through a fine sieve afterward to catch skins, which is the difference between a cream soup and a gritty one.
- Order of operationsThe roux is built in the pan the vegetables cooked in, then stirred into the boiling soup — not the other way round. Add it in a few spoonfuls at a time while whisking, or it will set into lumps.
- Cream added last, off the boilReheat after the cream goes in but do not let it boil; the soup will look curdled and thin. Hold it just below a simmer.
- Butter finishThe remaining 2 tablespoons of butter are stirred in cold, in small pieces, after the soup is off the heat. This is the emulsified finish that gives the soup its gloss, and it will break if the pot goes back on the flame.
- YieldAbout 1½ quarts, serving six as a first course.
Fannie Farmer's "Soups Without Stock" chapter is one of the quietly practical parts of The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896): a run of purées and cream soups built on vegetables, legumes and milk rather than on the day-long meat stocks that dominate the chapter before it. Lima beans are generally said to take their name from Lima, Peru, the port associated with the shipping of the large flat New World beans, though the derivation is traditional rather than firmly documented; dried limas were a cheap winter staple in American pantries, and were sold as "butter beans" in much of the South. The construction here is the standard cream-soup formula that runs through the chapter: a vegetable purée, a butter-flour roux for body, milk or cream for richness, and cold butter beaten in at the end. Learn it once and it produces two dozen soups.