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Cream of Lima Beans
Soak one cup dried beans over night, drain, and cook in boiling salted water until soft; drain, add three-fourths cup cream, and season with butter and salt. Reheat before serving.
A short entry that assumes a cook already knows how dried beans behave. The only real decisions are how long to soak, how hard to boil, and whether to leave the beans whole or break them down.
- Bean quantity and yieldOne cup of dried lima beans swells to roughly two to two and a half cups cooked, enough for about four as a side. Large "butter beans" and the smaller baby limas both work; baby limas cook faster and tend to hold their shape better.
- SoakingOvernight means eight to twelve hours in cold water at least two inches above the beans. In a warm kitchen a long soak can start to ferment and sour; refrigerate if the soak will run long.
- Salt in the cooking waterThe instruction to boil in salted water contradicts the old warning that salt toughens beans; it does not. Salted water seasons the beans through and, if anything, softens the skins.
- Cook them soft, not al denteThis is the hinge. The dish depends on beans yielding completely to a spoon, since the cream has no thickener but the starch the beans release. Undercooked limas leave a watery sauce. Expect 45 minutes to an hour and a quarter after soaking, depending on age.
- CreamCream of this period was typically much lighter than modern heavy cream, closer to today's light cream or half-and-half. Heavy cream will work but gives a much richer, heavier result; consider cutting it with a little of the bean cooking liquid.
- ReheatingBring the creamed beans back gently over low heat. Cream held at a hard boil will break, and the bean starch will catch and scorch on the bottom of the pan.
- SeasoningButter and salt are all the book asks for. A grind of white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg are common in creamed vegetables and are in keeping if you want them.
- Dried versus freshDried limas are meatier and starchier than frozen ones. Frozen baby limas can be substituted, but skip the soak, boil only until tender, and expect a thinner sauce.
Creamed vegetables run through The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book like a refrain: a boiled vegetable, cream or a white sauce, butter, salt, reheat. The formula suited a kitchen that cooked vegetables long and hard by modern standards and wanted something to carry them. Lima beans, whose name is generally traced to the Peruvian capital, and grown in the Americas long before European contact, were a staple of the American dried-bean shelf alongside navy and kidney beans, cheap and storable through a New England winter. The recipe's brevity is itself informative: soaking and boiling dried beans was assumed knowledge, so the book spends its words only on what turns a pot of beans into a dish for the table.