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Fresh Lima Beans
Plunge a pint fresh, shelled lima beans in two quarts boiling water with teaspoon salt and boil twenty-five minutes. Drain on sieve. Place in a frying pan with half teaspoon salt, three saltspoons white pepper and a half ounce butter; toss till well thickened, dress on a vegetable dish and serve.
A plain buttered vegetable in the Delmonico manner, where the whole point is the finish in the pan rather than the boiling. Two things need translating: the saltspoon, and the cooking time.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three of them is three-quarters of a teaspoon of white pepper. That is a lot of pepper for a pint of beans; half that suits most palates, and the white was chosen for looks, not flavour.
- Half an ounce of butterOne tablespoon. It is deliberately modest, meant to coat rather than to sauce.
- A pint of shelled beansMeasured by volume, roughly 10 to 12 ounces, which is about two pounds of beans in the pod. It serves three or four as a side dish.
- Twenty-five minutes is too longYoung fresh limas are tender in 12 to 18 minutes and go mealy and grey-skinned beyond that. Older, larger beans may want the full 25. Start testing at twelve and drain the moment a bean crushes easily against the roof of the mouth.
- If using frozenFrozen baby limas are blanched before freezing and need only five to eight minutes in boiling salted water. The finishing step is unchanged.
- "Toss till well thickened"The beans must go into the pan still hot and slightly damp from the sieve. The clinging water and the butter emulsify into a thin glaze as you toss; drain them bone dry and the butter simply slides off.
- Salting the waterA teaspoon in two quarts is light by modern standards. Salting more generously seasons the beans from within and means less salt is needed at the finish.
Lima beans take their name from the Peruvian capital, having been carried north and east from the Andes, where the species was domesticated long before European contact; the name used in nineteenth-century American seed catalogues is generally traced to the shipping port. By the time this book was compiled, fresh shelled limas were a summer staple in eastern American markets, sold in the pod and shelled at home, which is why the recipe assumes a pint of beans already out of the shell rather than a weight of pods. The method itself — boil hard in salted water, drain, then finish in a pan with butter, salt and white pepper — is the standard restaurant treatment of the period for almost any green vegetable, and it appears throughout books of this kind with only the vegetable changed. White pepper rather than black was the professional habit, chosen so no dark specks marred the dish when it reached the table.