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Dry Lima Beans
Wash one quart of dry lima beans in two warm waters, soak three hours, drain, and put on to cook in enough boiling water to cover them; cover pot with tin lid, adding more hot water as it boils away, boiling rapidly for one and a half hours, when there should be only water enough to come up to top of the beans-just sufficient to make a nice dressing. Five minutes before taking up, season with salt and pepper, and stir in a dressing made of one tablespoon each of flour and butter, rubbed together until smooth. This is a delicious dish.
A plain pot of dried limas finished with a butter-and-flour liaison. Two things need attention: the quantity, which is larger than it looks, and the hard boil, which will shred the beans.
- Quantity and yieldA quart of dry lima beans is roughly 1 3/4 to 2 lb, and they will roughly double in bulk. That is eight to ten servings; halve it for a household of four.
- Soak longer than three hoursThree hours in warm water may have sufficed for the beans this book's readers bought, but dried limas that have sat in storage do better with a full overnight soak, or an hour after a brief boil, then a drain.
- Simmer, do not boil rapidlyThe hinge of the dish. A hard boil for ninety minutes will burst the skins and reduce large limas to purée. Bring to the boil, then hold at a bare simmer and check at 45 minutes; most modern limas are tender in 45 to 75 minutes.
- Cook them throughLima beans contain a cyanogenic compound, present in much higher levels in dark-seeded varieties than in the pale limas usually sold; thorough cooking breaks it down. Cook until fully soft, never crunchy, and do not shorten the time. Leaving the lid loose rather than sealed, as the recipe's tin lid implies, does no harm.
- The water levelThe instruction to end with liquid just at the top of the beans is the real measure of doneness here. Add hot, not cold, water as it goes down, and take the lid off for the last stretch if there is too much.
- The dressingOne tablespoon each of flour and butter rubbed smooth is a beurre manié. Drop it in in small pieces and stir; five minutes at a simmer is enough to cook out the raw flour and thicken the bean liquor into a light sauce.
- Salt timingSalting at the end, as written, is fine but no longer thought necessary to keep skins tender. Salting the soak or the cooking water actually seasons the beans through and does no harm.
Dried limas were a common winter store, the same butter beans eaten green in summer put by and shelled out for the store cupboard. The bean is American in origin, generally traced to Peru - hence the name, from Lima - and was long established in American gardens. The treatment here is the standard one for dried legumes in a period kitchen: long boiling with hot water added by hand, and a spoonful of flour and butter at the end to turn the cooking liquid into something worth putting on the table.