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Lima Beans
Open a pint can of lima beans; plunge them into boiling water for five minutes. Drain well, then place in a saucepan with half ounce butter, half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons pepper and half teaspoon chopped parsley. Mix well with a wooden spoon, thoroughly heat for five minutes, tossing gently once in a while, and serve.
A five-minute side dish built on canned beans, with two archaic measures and one step whose purpose is not obvious.
- A pint canRoughly equivalent to today's 15-ounce can, which drains to about 1 1/2 cups of beans. Serves two as a side, three at a stretch.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is 1/2 teaspoon of pepper. That is assertive by modern standards; start with half and adjust.
- Half ounce butterOne tablespoon. Weighing butter was normal when it came in a crock or block rather than marked sticks.
- Why the boiling waterThe recipe does not say. The likeliest purpose of the five-minute plunge is to rinse away the flat, metallic canning liquor and heat the beans through, rather than to cook them further. Drain hard afterward or the butter will not cling.
- Do not stirHandling -- The recipe says to mix well with a wooden spoon and then toss gently. Canned limas are already soft to the point of collapse, so lift rather than beat them; vigorous stirring turns the dish to puree.
- Frozen insteadFrozen baby limas have better texture and flavour than canned. Boil them until just tender, drain, then continue with the butter, salt, pepper and parsley as written.
- ParsleyAdd it with the butter, as directed, but keep the heat gentle for the final five minutes so the parsley stays green rather than browning in the fat.
Lima beans are generally said to take their name from the Peruvian capital, the port through which the large flat-seeded variety is traditionally held to have reached Europe and North America; the bean itself is far older, cultivated in the Andes and in Mesoamerica long before contact, and large-seeded limas were growing in North American gardens well before the nineteenth century — Jefferson grew them in the 1790s. By 1900 they were a fixture of the American vegetable garden and, increasingly, of the tin can — commercial canning of vegetables expanded sharply in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and cookbooks of this period routinely offer instructions that begin "open a can." That is what makes this entry worth noticing: it is not a recipe for cooking beans but a recipe for rescuing preserved ones, a small piece of evidence that the tinned vegetable had already become an ordinary weeknight starting point rather than a novelty.