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Succotash
Place six medium-sized freshly cooked and scraped ears of Indian corn (or a can of canned corn will do) in a saucepan with a pint of Lima beans, adding about one ounce of butter, a pinch of salt and a little pepper and grated nutmeg, also one-half pint of milk. Heat it thoroughly for five minutes, add two tablespoonfuls of hot bechamel sauce, stir all well together, and serve.
A short, rich version of an American standard, written for a kitchen that had béchamel sitting on the stove all service. The measurements assume both vegetables arrive already cooked.
- Indian cornSimply maize — sweet corn. Six ears "freshly cooked and scraped" gives roughly 3 cups of kernels and pulp; scraping the cob after cutting releases the starchy milk, which does much of the thickening here. The recipe offers a single can of corn as the substitute, though for six ears' worth you would want closer to two 15-oz cans, drained.
- The beans must already be cookedA pint of shelled lima beans is not a pint of raw ones tipped into the pan; five minutes of heating will not cook them. Simmer fresh or frozen limas until fully tender first, which also matters because raw and undercooked limas are unpleasantly bitter and best not eaten. About 10 oz frozen baby limas, cooked, fills a pint.
- BéchamelTwo tablespoons of a basic milk-and-flour white sauce, kept hot. If you have none, a teaspoon of flour cooked in the butter before the milk goes in achieves the same body — the point is a small amount of binding, not a sauced dish.
- Five minutes means five minutesEverything in the pan is cooked already, so this is a heat-through. Longer, and the milk reduces and the corn kernels toughen.
- NutmegGrate it fresh and use very little; the quantity implied is a scrape, not a measured pinch. It is there as a béchamel seasoning rather than a flavour in its own right.
- Seasoning and saltCanned corn is usually salted, so taste before adding the pinch of salt.
- YieldServes four to six as a side dish. It holds badly — the starch sets and the milk separates on standing, so make it to order.
Succotash has a long history in North America: the name is generally traced to a Narragansett word, usually given as msickquatash, conventionally glossed as boiled or broken corn kernels, and the corn-and-bean pairing was standard Indigenous agriculture and cookery across the Northeast long before it entered colonial kitchens. By the nineteenth century it had settled into American cookbooks as a plain boiled vegetable dish, often stretched with salt pork. What a hotel version of the dish shows is what happened to homely American food when it reached a great hotel kitchen: the beans and corn stay, but butter, milk, nutmeg and a spoonful of b urn it into something that could go out on a Waldorf plate beside a French menu.