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Lima Beans, Bonne Femme
Place in an enamelled pan one finely chopped onion, two ounces lean raw ham cut in small squares, and one tablespoon melted butter, and nicely fry five minutes, stirring meanwhile. Add one pint fresh, shelled lima beans, one-half pint of broth. Tie together a very small head of lettuce and two branches parsley, and add to the beans. Season with a half teaspoon salt, three saltspoons pepper, half saltspoon grated nutmeg, and lightly mix. Cover pan and let gently boil thirty-five minutes, then lift up the lettuce, etc. Knead on a saucer one ounce butter with a light tablespoon flour and add to the beans, gently mix without mashing and cook for two minutes more. Pour them into a vegetable dish and serve.
A French braise applied to a New World bean: aromatics and ham sweated in butter, the beans simmered in broth with a bundle of greens, the liquid bound with kneaded butter at the end. Nothing here is difficult, but the measures and the cooking time both need translating.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Three saltspoons of pepper is about three-quarters of a teaspoon, which is assertive but correct for a pint of beans; the half saltspoon of nutmeg is a scant eighth teaspoon.
- A pint of shelled beansBeans were measured by volume, not weight. A pint of shelled limas is about 2 cups, roughly 10 to 12 ounces — the yield of about 2 pounds of beans in the pod. One 10-ounce box of frozen baby limas comes to about the same thing.
- Half a pint of brothOne cup. That is enough to come partway up the beans rather than cover them; this is a braise, and the liquid should reduce to a sauce that the flour and butter finish.
- Cooking timeThirty-five minutes suits large, starchy, fully mature limas. Modern fresh baby limas are tender in 20 to 25 minutes and frozen ones in 10 to 15. Test at the shorter time; past that point they slump and the skins separate.
- The enamelled panEnamel is nonreactive; bare cast iron and unlined copper can discolour beans and dull the broth, which is the likely reason for the specification. Any nonreactive saucepan with a lid does the job.
- Lean raw ham'Raw' here means uncooked cured ham rather than boiled or cooked ham. Prosciutto, jambon de Bayonne or a piece of country ham all answer. Two ounces, cut in small dice, and mind the salt if the ham is very salty.
- The lettuce bundleThe tied lettuce and parsley are a flavouring, added whole and removed before serving, like a bouquet garni. Use a small firm head or a romaine heart; loose leaf lettuce disintegrates and cannot be lifted out.
- Beurre maniéButter kneaded raw with flour and stirred in at the end thickens the liquid without a roux. It must cook two minutes at a simmer to lose the raw flour taste, and the beans want folding rather than stirring so they stay whole.
- YieldServes four as a side dish.
"Bonne femme" — good wife — is the French kitchen's label for plain domestic cooking: a garnish or treatment of onion, bacon or ham, and whatever vegetable is at hand, done in one pan without stock-making or straining. Applying it to lima beans is the sort of transatlantic graft that gives this book its title. The bean itself is South American, generally traced to Peru and named for Lima, and by the turn of the twentieth century it was a staple of the American summer garden while remaining a curiosity in French cookery, which knew flageolets and haricots better. Filippini, who cooked at Delmonico's in New York, wrote for households that expected French method and shopped in American markets, and the recipe reads exactly that way: a tied bouquet of lettuce and parsley, a finish of kneaded butter, and a vegetable no Parisian cook would have had to hand.