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Succotash
Cut hot boiled corn from cob, add equal quantity of hot boiled shelled beans; season with butter and salt; reheat before serving.
Fannie Farmer assumes you have already boiled corn and shell beans for another meal; this is an assembly, not a from-scratch method. A few gaps are worth filling.
- The beans"Shelled beans" in a New England kitchen of this period usually means fresh shell beans — cranberry, horticultural, or fresh lima — though dried beans were also used, especially in winter versions. Frozen baby limas or fresh cranberry beans, simmered until tender (20-30 minutes), stand in directly; canned beans work but go mushy on reheating.
- Equal quantityMeasure by volume after the corn is cut, not by weight. Four ears of corn yield roughly 2 cups of kernels, so pair with 2 cups of cooked beans for about four servings.
- Cutting the cornStand the ear in a wide bowl and cut down with a thin knife, then scrape the cob with the back of the blade to release the milky pulp. That pulp is what binds the dish; without it the succotash is just two vegetables in a pan.
- Don't overcook the cornBoil the ears three to five minutes only. Corn boiled to the longer times common in period directions turns starchy and loses the sweetness the dish depends on.
- ReheatingButter, salt, and a low heat with the pan covered for three or four minutes is all that is wanted. A few spoonfuls of cream or of the bean cooking liquid at this stage will keep it from drying out.
- SeasoningThe original stops at butter and salt, in keeping with the plain seasoning typical of this book. Black pepper is a reasonable addition; so is a little of the salt pork that older New England versions cooked with the beans.
Succotash comes from the Narragansett msickquatash, roughly "boiled whole kernels of corn," and the dish is one of the clearest surviving lines from Algonquian cooking into the New England kitchen. Corn and beans were grown together and eaten together long before English settlement, and the pairing persisted because it worked: the two crops share a season and, as it happens, complement each other nutritionally. By the time this book appeared in the 1890s, succotash had become a fixture of the northeastern late-summer table and of Thanksgiving menus in parts of New England, where a heavier version with salt pork and dried beans was served in winter. Farmer's entry is characteristically stripped down — no pork, no cream, no fuss — reflecting the Boston Cooking School's preference for clean, measurable, plainly seasoned vegetable cookery.