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Lima Beans in Cream
Open a pint can lima beans, drain off the water and plunge them in boiling water for two minutes. Drain on a sieve, then place in a saucepan with a half gill milk, gill cream, and season with a half teaspoon salt and saltspoon cayenne. Mix well and let boil for five minutes. Knead in a saucepan a half tablespoon butter with a teaspoon flour, then add the butter little by little to the lima beans, continually mixing while adding it. Cook for five minutes, dress on a vegetable dish and serve.
A short creamed-vegetable side built on canned beans, written when a gill was still a working kitchen measure. The conversions matter more than the technique here.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so this is 1/4 cup milk and 1/2 cup cream. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, which is a great deal of cayenne for a pint of beans -- start with a pinch and taste.
- A pint canA pint can holds about 2 cups including the packing liquid, so nearer 1.5 cups drained, which is roughly the drained yield of a modern 15-oz can. Enough for two or three as a side.
- Why the boiling-water plungeTwo minutes in fresh boiling water rinses off the tinny, starchy canning liquid and warms the beans through. It is worth doing; skipping it leaves the cream tasting of the can.
- The hinge: beurre manié — butter and flour coldThe hinge: beurre manie, butter and flour cold -- butter and flour are kneaded together raw, then worked into the simmering cream a little at a time so the flour disperses without lumping. If you drop it in as one lump you will get pasty knots. The original says to knead it 'in a saucepan'; any small bowl will do as well.
- Frozen limas insteadFrozen baby limas cooked until just tender give a far better texture than canned and slot straight into the cream stage. Canned limas are already soft, so ten total minutes of simmering will push them toward mush -- keep the heat low and stir gently.
- Keep it below a hard boil'let boil for five minutes' is harder on modern light cream, which can break or scorch. Hold it at a bare simmer and it will thicken perfectly well.
- Seasoning at the endHalf a teaspoon of salt assumes unsalted canned beans. Taste after the beans have gone in, since canned vegetables carry their own salt.
Lima beans take their name from the Peruvian capital -- the spelling long outran any agreement about pronunciation. By the time this book was compiled, a pint can of limas was an unremarkable pantry item: commercial vegetable canning had expanded enormously in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and cookbooks aimed at hotel and household cooks alike began to open with "open a can" without apology. The treatment itself resembles the French-trained hotel practice of the era, a cream reduction tightened with kneaded butter and flour rather than a made-ahead white sauce, and it is the sort of quick vegetable garnish a professional kitchen could turn out to order.