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Lima Beans Sauted
Use one quart of freshly-shelled lima beans, and parboil them in salted water for twenty minutes. Place them in fresh, cool water after draining, again drain them and put in a sautepan with a good-sized lump of butter, salt, pepper and nutmeg to taste. Cook for five minutes, tossing well, then moisten with some cream, adding a little chopped parsley, mix well together, and serve.
A straightforward vegetable side from the Waldorf's kitchen, and one that survives translation almost intact. The only real decisions are bean size and how much cream.
- A quart of shelled beansRoughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb of shelled beans, which serves four to six as a side. If you are shelling them yourself, expect to buy somewhere around 3 to 4 lb in the pod, depending on the variety.
- Fresh vs. frozenFrozen baby limas are already blanched and need only 5-8 minutes in salted water, not twenty. Twenty minutes applies to fresh, mature beans; fresh baby limas are done in about 10.
- Test rather than timeThe parboil should leave the beans tender but not collapsing, since they get five more minutes in butter. Bite one at 15 minutes and judge from there.
- The cold-water stepShocking in cool water is not a flourish. It stops the cooking and keeps the beans green rather than dull olive, which matters in a dish this plain.
- "A good-sized lump of butter"About 3 tablespoons for this quantity. Keep the heat moderate so the butter foams and coats rather than browns.
- NutmegGrate it fresh and use a restrained amount. Pre-ground nutmeg from a jar is flat and will read as dusty against the cream.
- The creamA quarter cup of heavy cream is enough to bind. Let it bubble briefly so it thickens and clings; if it stays thin it pools in the dish.
Lima beans were carried out of South America by Spanish ships and are traditionally said to take their name from Lima, the Peruvian capital, from whose port they were shipped; the beans on American tables by 1900 were long-established garden crops rather than imports. Oscar Tschirky's book records the Waldorf's kitchen at a moment when French technique was applied to thoroughly American produce: the method here, finish with butter, cream and parsley, is a familiar hotel treatment for vegetables of the season. Fresh shell beans were strictly seasonal work in a hotel kitchen, requiring hands to shell bushels of pods by the quart, which is part of why the dish reads as simple while being labor that no home cook today would recognize.