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Succotash (Take pint of shelled lima)
Take pint of shelled lima beans (green), wash, cover with hot water, let stand five minutes, pour off, place over fire in hot water, and boil fifteen minutes; have ready corn from six good-sized ears, and add to beans; boil half an hour, add salt, pepper and two table-spoons butter. Be careful in cutting down corn not to cut too deep; better not cut deep enough and then scrape; after corn is added, watch carefully to keep from scorching. Or, to cook with meat, boil one pound salt pork two hours, add beans, cook fifteen minutes, then add corn, omitting butter. Or, string beans may be used, cooking one hour before adding corn.
A plain summer succotash from fresh shell beans and just-cut corn. The one thing to change is the corn's cooking time; everything else translates directly.
- The half hour of corn is too longCorn cut from the cob is tender in three to five minutes and turns starchy and flat past ten. Cook the beans until they are nearly done, then add the corn for the last five minutes only.
- Cutting the cornThe instruction to cut shallow and then scrape is the hinge of the dish. The tips of the kernels give sweetness, the scraped milk and pulp behind them give body — cut deep and you get tough kernel bases and no thickening.
- Six ears of cornSix good-sized ears gives roughly 3 to 4 cups of kernels plus milk, which is about right against a pint of shelled beans. Older sweet-corn varieties were generally smaller-eared than today's hybrids, so err on the generous side.
- Fresh green limasA pint of shelled green limas is about 10 to 12 oz, or roughly two and a half pounds in the pod. Frozen baby limas work; they need only 8 to 10 minutes and no soaking or blanching step.
- The five-minute soak and pour-offThe recipe gives no reason for this step; it may help soften the skins. With frozen or very young beans it can be skipped.
- The salt pork versionTwo hours of boiling a pound of salt pork gives a heavily salted broth. Taste before adding any salt at all, and add none if you have used the pork.
- ScorchingCorn milk and starch settle and catch on the bottom quickly. Use a heavy pan, keep the liquid barely at a simmer once the corn is in, and stir from the bottom.
- String beansThe third variation makes a different dish — green beans, not shell beans. An hour of boiling will collapse modern snap beans; 10 to 15 minutes is plenty before the corn goes in.
- YieldServes four to six as a side dish; the pork version stretches to a supper for four.
Succotash is one of the dishes in nineteenth-century American cookbooks whose name comes from an Indigenous language — generally traced to the Narragansett msickquatash, meaning boiled whole kernels of corn. The pairing of corn with beans reflects how the two were often grown together in the same fields, and the combination happens to be nutritionally complementary, though the cookbooks of the period do not say so. That The Dixie Cook Book gives three versions — butter, salt pork, or string beans in place of limas — suggests a dish made from whatever was ripe in the garden that week, enriched with whatever fat was to hand.