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Lima Beans with Fines Herbes
Boil a pint shelled lima beans in a quart boiling water with teaspoon salt twenty-five minutes. Drain on sieve, then place in a sautoire with ounce good butter. Season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper. Finely chop together two branches parsley, one branch chervil, ten branches chives and six tarragon leaves. Add this hash to the beans, toss well in pan and cook five minutes, frequently tossing meanwhile. Transfer beans into a vegetable dish and serve.
A straightforward buttered vegetable that lives or dies on the herbs going in at the very end. Two conversions and one timing matter.
- A pint of shelled beansMeasured by volume, not weight: roughly 2 cups, about 10-12 oz shelled, which serves four as a side. If you are buying limas in the pod, expect to need close to 2 lb.
- SautoireA shallow straight-sided sauté pan. Anything wide enough to toss the beans in a single layer will do; a crowded pan steams them instead of glazing them.
- SaltspoonA quarter teaspoon. Two saltspoons of pepper is half a teaspoon, which is assertive but correct here against the butter.
- Twenty-five minutesThat is the time for large, mature fresh limas. Young fresh beans are done in 10-12 minutes and frozen limas in 5-8; test one rather than trusting the clock, since overcooked limas turn mealy and shed their skins.
- ButterAn ounce is 2 tablespoons. It is meant to melt into the residual moisture on the drained beans and coat them, so drain them well but use them warm.
- BranchesSprigs. Ten branches of chives means ten whole stalks, not bunches, and the six tarragon leaves are deliberately few, since tarragon will take over the dish.
- If you cannot find chervilIt is scarce and wilts fast. Use a little extra parsley plus a few more chives rather than substituting dill or basil, which pull the flavor somewhere else entirely.
- The final five minutesThe herbs get only a short cooking in the butter, so they stay green and fragrant. The recipe does not specify the heat, but a screaming-hot pan will turn the parsley and chervil dull and hay-like.
Fines herbes is a fixed French formula, not a general term for chopped greenery: parsley, chervil, chives and tarragon, chopped fine and added at the end of cooking so their volatile oils survive. Its appearance on lima beans sets a New World bean -- usually said to take its name from the Peruvian capital -- under the rules of a French professional kitchen. The vocabulary of the instructions points to a professional hand: sautoire, saltspoon, and the direction to toss rather than stir all belong to the hotel and restaurant idiom.