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Succotash
2 cups green corn or I cup
Salt and pepper dried corn
1 cup milk
2 cups fresh Lima, string or
4 tablespoons butter butter beans or 1 cup dried
Lima beans
If fresh vegetables are used, cut the corn from the cob. Cover the beans with the least possible amount of boiling water, to prevent scorching, and cook until tender. Drain off the water, add the corn and the milk and cook slowly until the corn is tender. Add the butter and other seasoning.
When dried corn and beans are used, soak both separately overnight. In the morning, cover the beans with fresh water, and boil them very gently until tender. Do not drain the water from the corn, but set the pan containing it on the back of the range where it will cook slowly. When the beans are tender, drain and add them to the corn, allowing only water enough to cover them. Cook slowly until tender and drain off water and save for soup. Add the milk and seasoning.
The ingredient list has been scrambled by the two-column setting of the original page; read it as 2 cups green corn (or 1 cup dried corn), 2 cups fresh Lima, string or butter beans (or 1 cup dried Lima beans), 1 cup milk, 4 tablespoons butter, and salt and pepper.
- The hinge: cook the beans first, aloneCorn goes from sweet to starchy and tough in a few minutes, while Limas need twenty to forty. Getting the beans tender before the corn joins them is the whole method, and the reason for the odd two-stage instruction.
- "Green corn"This means fresh sweet corn in the milk stage, not a green-coloured variety. Two cups is roughly three to four ears cut from the cob; scrape the cobs with the back of the knife to get the milky liquid, which thickens the dish.
- Dried cornNot cornmeal and not hominy, but sweet corn cut from the cob and dried, a common winter store in households of the period. It still exists as a specialty product; if you cannot find it, use frozen corn and skip the soaking entirely.
- "The back of the range"On a wood or coal range the area away from the firebox, including the back of the cooktop, served as the low-heat zone. Modern equivalent: the lowest burner setting, at a bare tremble.
- "The least possible amount of boiling water"Enough to just cover the beans, topped up if it threatens to boil dry. The recipe gives the reason as preventing scorching; in the fresh version the water is then drained off, in the dried version it is saved for soup.
- String beansGiven as an option, but they cook far faster than Limas and will collapse. If you use them, cut them into inch lengths and add them to the pot only about eight minutes before the corn.
- Milk and scorchingOnce the milk goes in, the pot needs low heat and attention; milk with corn starch in it catches on the bottom quickly. A heavy-based pan is worth the trouble.
- Yield and seasoningMakes roughly four side-dish servings on the quantities given. The four tablespoons of butter for that quantity is generous by modern habit; two is plenty, and the dish wants a good deal of salt.
Succotash is one of the oldest continuously cooked dishes in North America: the name comes from the Narragansett msickquatash, roughly "boiled whole kernels of corn," and the pairing of corn with beans reflects the intercropping of the two plants long before European contact. Colonists in New England adopted both the crop pairing and the dish, and by the nineteenth century succotash was firmly a Yankee household staple, with a shellfish-and-salt-pork version served in Plymouth on Forefathers' Day. What marks this Butterick version as a product of its moment is the dual set of directions: fresh vegetables in season, dried corn and dried Limas in winter, with the cooking water saved for soup. Home freezing had not yet made summer corn a year-round ingredient, so a general household manual had to teach both versions of the same dish.