Home › Vegetables › Lima Beans, Boiled
Lima Beans, Boiled
If the green beans are used, put one pint of them into just enough boiling salted water to cover, and boil slowly until tender. Drain off the water, and add one cup of milk or cream, a small piece of butter and salt and pepper to taste; or, omit the milk. Let the beans simmer a moment in the milk, and serve. If dried limas are used they should be soaked twelve hours in plenty of cold water; and when boiled, half a teaspoon of soda should be added to the water. STRING BEANS (Canned) - Open the cans carefully, turn A 4 the beans into a wide, shallow pan, and let them stand thus for half an hour or so, that they may recover their fresh flavor. Cook them for not more than five minutes in fresh boiling water, add pepper, salt and butter, heat once more, and send to table. STRING BEANS (Fresh) - The beans should be turned into a colander and rinsed with cold water, then placed in a saucepan with boiling water and one teaspoon of salt. A few strips of salt pork may be cooked with them, and also served, if liked. They should be cooked gently until tender and then drained. Season with butter, salt and pepper.
Three separate recipes have run together on this page — boiled limas, canned string beans, and fresh string beans. The stray "A 4" mid-paragraph is a printer's signature mark, not an instruction.
- A pint of shelled beansMeasured shelled, not in the pod: about 10 to 12 oz, which serves three or four as a side. If you are shelling fresh limas yourself, start with roughly 2 lb in the pod.
- "Green" limasThis means fresh shelled beans, not a variety. Frozen baby limas are the practical stand-in and need 8 to 10 minutes; fresh shelled limas want 15 to 20 minutes at a bare simmer, dried limas 45 to 60 minutes after their soak.
- The half teaspoon of sodaSkip it. Baking soda in the bean water was commonly recommended when tap water was hard and beans refused to soften, but it destroys thiamine, turns the skins slippery and gives a faint soapy edge. If your beans are old and stubborn, a longer soak and more patience do the same work.
- The milk finishKeep it below a simmer once the milk goes in. Lima beans are starchy and the milk will catch and scorch on the bottom of the pan quickly; a moment of gentle heat is genuinely all that is wanted, exactly as written.
- Airing the canned beansThe half hour in a shallow pan was meant to drive off the metallic, flat taste of beans held in soldered tin cans. Modern lining has largely solved that, so drain, rinse and heat through for two or three minutes — five minutes in fresh boiling water will leave them limp.
- Fresh string beans, "cooked gently until tender"Period taste ran to fully soft beans, 20 minutes or more. Five to seven minutes in well-salted boiling water gives crisp-tender beans; if you want the salt pork flavor without the long cooking, render the pork first and toss the drained beans in the fat.
- SaltOne teaspoon per pot is light by current standards for boiling green vegetables. Salt the water assertively — it seasons the beans from the inside and does not need to be corrected later.
Lima beans take their name from Lima, Peru, where Spanish traders encountered them; the bean itself is one of the oldest domesticated crops of the Andes and coastal Peru, cultivated there for thousands of years before it traveled north. By the time The Butterick Cook Book appeared, limas were an ordinary American garden and market vegetable, sold fresh in the pod in summer and dried the rest of the year — which is why the recipe has to explain both. The canned string bean instructions are the more revealing entry: a household book of this period took commercially canned vegetables for granted while still assuming the cook would need to coax the tin taste out of them, a small record of the moment when factory canning had become normal but not yet reliable.