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Winter Succotash
Wash one pint lima beans (dried when green) and one and a half pints dried corn; put beans in kettle and cover with cold water; cover corn with cold water in a tin pan, set on top of kettle of beans so that while the latter are boiling the corn may be heating and swelling; boil beans fifteen minutes, drain off, cover with boiling water, and when tender (half an hour) add corn, cooking both together for fifteen minutes; five minutes before serving, add salt, pepper and a dressing of butter and flour rubbed together, or onehalf tea-cup cream or milk thickened with one table-spoon flour.
A pantry version of succotash built entirely from dried goods, from a period when green shell beans and sweet corn were summer-only. The method is sound; the timings assume ingredients that behave differently from what you will buy today.
- Soak the beans firstThe recipe implies dried limas will be tender in about 45 minutes of total boiling. Unsoaked dried limas usually need 60-90 minutes, and older beans longer still. An overnight soak in cold water, drained, brings them close to the timing given here.
- "Dried corn" is not popcorn or cornmealThis means sweet corn cut from the cob and dried, sold today as dried sweet corn or Pennsylvania Dutch-style corn; the Southwestern equivalent is chicos, roasted then dried. Field corn, hominy and cornmeal are all different products and will not work. Freeze-dried corn is far softer and needs only a few minutes.
- The stacked pan is a makeshift double boilerSetting the pan of corn over the boiling beans lets the steam soften and swell it while the beans cook. Any heatproof bowl that sits on the rim of the pot does the same, or simply soak the corn in hot water for an hour in advance.
- Why the beans are drained after fifteen minutesThe first water is dumped and the beans returned to boiling water, which keeps the boil unbroken; some of the compounds that cause gas go out with the discarded water. Adding cold water mid-cook is often said to toughen the skins.
- Salt at the end, as writtenSalt goes in five minutes before serving. Salting early is traditionally said to slow the softening of the skins, though this is disputed.
- The dressing"Butter and flour rubbed together" is beurre manié: butter and flour kneaded to a paste and stirred in off a hard boil so it disperses. The recipe gives no quantities for it. The alternative is a thickened cream; a period tea-cup is generally reckoned at somewhere between half and three-quarters of a modern cup.
- Quantities and yieldA pint of dried limas is about 14 oz and swells considerably. With the corn this makes roughly 6 to 8 side servings; the finished dish should be moist and loose, not soupy, so hold back some cooking liquid before thickening.
Succotash comes from a Narragansett word, generally given as msickquatash, meaning boiled whole kernels of corn, and the dish of corn cooked with beans is one of the clearest survivals of Native American cooking in the Anglo-American kitchen. The pairing was agricultural before it was culinary: corn and beans were grown together, and eaten together long before anyone wrote the combination down. What makes this version distinctly late nineteenth century is that everything in it is dried. The Dixie Cook-Book (1883) was compiled for households that put food by rather than bought it, and drying sweet corn on racks or in a cooling oven, and shelling green limas to dry, were ordinary August work. The result is a February dish — hence "winter" — that reconstructs a summer one, and the small refinements at the end, butter and flour or a little cream, are there to give body to ingredients that have lost their own juices.