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Lima Beans, Hollandaise
Boil one pint shelled, fresh lima beans in a quart boiling water with a teaspoon salt for forty minutes. Drain well on a sieve, replace in pan, pour in a Hollandaise sauce, mix well, dress on a hot dish and serve.
A three-line vegetable dish whose success rests entirely on not overcooking the beans and not overheating the sauce.
- The hinge: keep the pan off the heatHollandaise breaks above roughly 160-170F, so the beans are dressed in the warm pan away from the burner, never cooked further once the sauce goes in. If the mixture needs holding, keep it over water no hotter than a hand can bear.
- Forty minutes is far too longForty minutes is long by modern practice -- fresh shelled limas are generally tender in 20-25 minutes at a simmer, small young ones in 15, and at forty they are likely to be mealy and split.
- QuantitiesA pint of shelled beans is about 2 cups, and serves three to four as a side. A quart of water is 4 cups.
- How much sauceThe original assumes you know; about 3/4 cup of hollandaise (two yolks' worth) coats a pint of beans without drowning them.
- Frozen and dried substitutesFrozen baby limas work and need 8-10 minutes only. Dried limas are a different dish entirely and require soaking and a much longer simmer before they reach this point.
- SaltA teaspoon in a quart of water is a light seasoning by modern standards; salt the water as you would for pasta if you want the beans seasoned through, and hold back on salting the sauce.
- DrainingShake the sieve thoroughly and let the beans steam dry for a moment. Any clinging water thins the hollandaise and it will slide off into the dish.
Lima beans are generally said to take their name from the Peruvian capital, the port through which the large flat variety is traditionally held to have reached North America in the nineteenth century; the plant itself was domesticated in the Andes and in Mesoamerica long before, and had reached Europe with the Columbian exchange. Pairing a plain boiled vegetable with hollandaise is a habit of the French-influenced hotel and household cookery that dominated English-language cookbooks around 1900, when an egg-and-butter emulsion was one common way to make asparagus, broccoli, artichokes or beans fit for a formal table. Its presence in a book called The International Cook Book is telling: an American vegetable, a French sauce, and a name borrowed from South America, all in three sentences.