Home › The World's Kitchen › Lima Beans, Fermiere
Lima Beans, Fermiere
Finely slice two very small, scraped carrots, one small white onion and one ounce lean salt pork cut in small pieces, place in an earthen pot with a teaspoon lard, and gently brown for six minutes, then add a pint shelled Lima beans. Tie together two leaves lettuce, one bean garlic, one branch parsley and a branch chervil and add to the beans, pour hot water up to half the height of the beans. Season with half a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon sugar and two saltspoons pepper. Mix well, cover the pan, cook on the range for five minutes, then set in oven for thirty-five minutes. Remove, lift up the bouquet, add half ounce butter and toss well. Place on a vegetable dish and serve.
A braise rather than a boil: the beans cook mostly in their own steam with only enough water to come halfway up, so the seasoning stays concentrated. A few of the terms need translating.
- "One bean garlic"This means one clove of garlic — the older books often call a clove a "bean" of garlic. It goes into the herb bundle whole and is discarded, so it perfumes rather than flavours aggressively.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of pepper is half a teaspoon. That is a fair amount of pepper for a pint of beans and is deliberate.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. A moderate oven, in the region of 350F, suits a covered braise of this length; hotter and the shallow water may boil away before the beans are done.
- A pint of shelled beansRoughly 10 to 12 ounces, about two cups — enough for four as a side dish. Buying in the pod, expect to need something in the order of two to three pounds of fresh limas, depending on the pods.
- Fresh, frozen or driedThe 35-minute oven time assumes fresh shelled beans. Frozen limas need about half that and no pre-soaking; dried beans will not soften in this little liquid at all and should be soaked and simmered separately first.
- The earthen potAny lidded ovenproof pot works, but earthenware or enamelled cast iron holds heat evenly and matters more here than usual, since there is very little water to buffer hot spots. Check once at the halfway mark and add a splash if it has gone dry.
- The bouquetLettuce leaves wrapped around the garlic, parsley and chervil and tied with kitchen twine — the lettuce is the parcel as much as an ingredient. If chervil is unavailable, a little tarragon plus extra parsley is the nearest thing; dried chervil contributes almost nothing.
- Salt porkSalt pork varies a good deal in saltiness. Taste before adding the half teaspoon of salt, or blanch the diced pork for a minute and drain it first.
- FinishingThe butter goes in off the heat and is tossed, not stirred in over flame. That is what pulls the small amount of remaining liquid into a glaze on the beans.
Fermière — "farmer's wife" — is one of the standard French garnish names, and in classical usage it means vegetables cut in thin slices and cooked slowly in butter: carrot, onion, sometimes celery or turnip, with a scrap of salt pork for depth. Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, filled his cookbooks — among them The International Cook Book (1906) — with exactly this sort of hotel-kitchen shorthand applied to American produce, and lima beans were an obvious candidate. Native to the Andes and named for the Peruvian capital, they had been a garden staple in the eastern United States for well over a century by the time this was written. Dressing them in a French braise, herb bouquet and all, is the book's whole project in miniature: a familiar American vegetable given a continental method and a French name on the menu.