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Lima Beans, Stanford
Cut into small square pieces two ounces raw lean ham and three leeks, place in an enamelled pan with one ounce butter and gently fry to a nice brown colour; add a light tablespoon flour; stir well. Moisten with a pint broth, then add pint shelled lima beans. Season with half teaspoon salt, three saltspoons pepper and half saltspoon grated nutmeg; mix well, cover pan and cook on range on a slow fire thirty minutes. Remove, dress on a deep hot dish and serve.
A leek-and-ham braise for lima beans, built on a small roux. Nothing here is difficult; the details that matter are the seasoning scale, the kind of beans, and how long they actually need.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three saltspoons of pepper is three-quarters of a teaspoon and half a saltspoon of nutmeg is an eighth. That much pepper for a pint of beans is aggressive by current taste; start with a quarter teaspoon and add at the end.
- Raw lean hamThis means uncooked, cured ham rather than the pink boiled kind. Prosciutto, speck, a piece of country ham or pancetta all work. Two ounces diced small is enough to season the dish, not to be a meat component.
- A pint of shelled beansRoughly 10 to 12 ounces, which is about two cups. Frozen baby limas are the practical substitute and need no adjustment in volume; dried limas are not interchangeable here, since they would need soaking and far longer cooking than the pint of broth allows.
- Cooking timeThirty minutes over a slow fire suited freshly shelled field limas. Frozen baby limas are tender in 10 to 15 minutes of gentle simmering, and pushing them to half an hour turns them mealy and breaks the skins.
- The enamelled panFilippini specifies enamel, without saying why; a plausible reason is that bare iron can discolour pale vegetables and sauces. Any nonreactive pan, stainless or enamelled, does the job.
- LeeksThree leeks means white and pale green parts only, split lengthwise and washed hard between the layers. Grit is the usual failure in a dish this simple.
- The rouxA light tablespoon of flour into an ounce of butter, cooked with the ham and leeks, then moistened with broth. Add the broth in stages and stir it smooth before the rest goes in, or the flour will sit in lumps around the beans.
- YieldServes four as a side. The finished dish should be loose and lightly bound, not stiff; slacken with a little more broth if it tightens on the heat.
Alexander Filippini, long the chef at Delmonico's in New York, filled The International Cook Book (1906) with thousands of short numbered recipes, a great many of them tagged with the name of a customer, a colleague or a public figure — the standard flattery of the grand-restaurant kitchen, where naming a garnish after a patron cost nothing and pleased everyone. Which Stanford is meant here is not stated, and the book offers no explanation for any of its dedications. The beans themselves carry a place name of their own: lima beans take it from Lima, Peru, and were exported north out of Peruvian ports through the nineteenth century, though the plant had been cultivated across the Americas for millennia. The treatment is plainly French — a diced ham-and-allium base, a light roux, broth, nutmeg — applied to an American market vegetable, which is roughly the whole method of Filippini's book in a single dish.