Important: Safety Warning

This page directs cooking salted and acidic food in an untinned copper vessel. Bare copper in contact with such food dissolves copper salts into it, which are poisonous to eat.

This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.

No. 2699

Lima or Kidney Beans, Maitre d'Hotel

Haricots de Lima ou Flageolets Maitre d'Hotel

Have a pound of medium-sized, freshly picked lima beans; boil them in salted water in an untinned copper saucepan, then drain. Put four ounces of butter in a sautoir, heat it well, add the beans and saute, seasoning with salt and chopped parsley; stir in a little veloute sauce (No. 415) and fresh butter, squeeze the juice of a lemon over, then serve.

← No. 2698 Fresh Beans, with Cream and English Style Beans, Peas & Lentils No. 2700 Red Beans, Smothered →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's shorthand assumes a professional brigade: a cross-reference for the sauce, no timings, and a copper pan nobody keeps anymore. The dish is simply fresh shell beans finished in parsley butter with a spoonful of velouté for body.

The untinned copper panUnlined copper was used with green vegetables because trace copper ions fix the chlorophyll and keep the color bright. Cooking salted, then acidulated food in bare copper leaches metal into it; use stainless or enamelled steel and accept a slightly duller bean.
SautoirA straight-sided sauté pan, wide enough to hold the beans in a shallow layer. Depth matters less than surface area here, since the beans should roll in the butter rather than stew.
FlageoletsThe pale green French shell bean, harvested young. Fresh ones are rare outside France; dried flageolets soaked and simmered until tender, or fresh or frozen baby limas, all work in the same finishing treatment.
Velouté, No. 415Ranhofer's velouté is white veal or chicken stock thickened with a blond roux and reduced. A few tablespoons of any well-reduced light stock sauce will do; the point is a glossy coating, not a sauced dish.
Timing the beansFresh shelled limas need 15 to 20 minutes in well-salted boiling water, frozen ones 5 to 8. Drain them the moment they are tender through; the sauté that follows is only two or three minutes to coat and heat.
The butterFour ounces for a pound of beans is restaurant richness, and half that makes a cleaner dish. Add the final knob of fresh butter off the heat so it emulsifies with the velouté rather than breaking into oil.
Lemon lastA whole lemon's juice will overwhelm a pound of beans and can curdle the sauce if added over high heat. Squeeze it off the flame, taste, and stop when the butter tastes bright rather than sour.
YieldA pound of shelled beans serves four as a side dish.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is his attempt to set the whole repertoire down in numbered order, French title first. Maitre d'hotel as a preparation means butter worked with chopped parsley and lemon juice, the standard headwaiter's finish applied to grilled meat, fish and vegetables alike; here it is loosened with a little velouté into something closer to a sauce. That lima beans and flageolets share an entry says a good deal about the kitchen: the American bean, common in markets from New England to the South, is slotted straight into a French formula written for the European shell bean, the technique unchanged. The direction to boil green vegetables in untinned copper was common professional practice in the period and appears in nineteenth-century French manuals, before the chemistry behind it was understood.