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Puree of Lima Beans
Place a quart of drained, canned lima beans in a saucepan with four and a half pints water, one sliced onion, one sliced carrot, two branches parsley, two cloves, one bay leaf, half ounce butter, one level tablespoon salt, and briskly boil for forty minutes. Drain on a sieve and keep the broth. Remove the onion, carrot, parsley, clove and bay leaf. Place the lima beans in a mortar and pound to a pulp; replace them in the saucepan with their broth, season with two saltspoons cayenne pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg, adding an ounce butter; lightly mix and let boil for five minutes. Dilute two ounces rice flour in one gill cream and add to the soup; lightly mix while boiling for two minutes. Remove, strain through a Chinese strainer into a soup tureen and serve with a plate of bread croutons.
A classical French purée soup built on canned beans, written when a mortar and a conical strainer were standard equipment. The measures are the fussy part; the method is straightforward.
- Quantities in modern termsA quart of drained canned limas is roughly 1½ lb, about three 15-oz cans. Four and a half pints of water is 9 cups; a gill of cream is 1/2 cup; 2 oz rice flour is about 1/3 cup.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon. Two saltspoons of cayenne in this volume is aggressive by current taste — start with a pinch and correct at the end.
- The forty-minute boilCanned beans are already cooked, so the long boil serves mainly to extract the aromatics and reduce the liquid. Expect the volume to drop; the body of the finished soup comes from the puréed beans and the rice flour as much as from reduction.
- Instead of the mortarA blender or food processor does in thirty seconds what pounding does in ten minutes. Purée the beans with a ladle of the reserved broth rather than dry, then return everything to the pan.
- Chinese strainerA chinois — the fine conical sieve. Push the soup through with a ladle or the back of a small ladle. Any fine mesh strainer works; this step removes the bean skins and is what separates a purée from a mash.
- The rice flour slurryRice flour will lump if it hits hot liquid dry. Whisk it smooth into the cold cream first, as directed, then stream it in while the soup is at a bare boil and whisk for the full two minutes so the starch loses its raw taste.
- SaltOne level tablespoon assumes unsalted canned beans and unsalted broth. Most canned limas are packed in salted water, so rinse them and add half the salt at the start, then adjust before serving.
- YieldAbout 2 quarts, serving six to eight as a first course. It thickens considerably as it stands; thin with hot water or milk on reheating.
Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, organized his books around the classical French repertoire, and this is a textbook potage purée: a vegetable cooked with an aromatic garnish, sieved, enriched with butter and cream, bound with a starch, and finished with croutons. What marks it as American is the bean. Lima beans are generally said to take their name from Lima, Peru, where large-seeded varieties of Phaseolus lunatus were long cultivated and from whose port they are traditionally held to have been shipped north in the nineteenth century. Equally telling is the frank use of canned beans as a starting point — commercial canning was by then reliable enough that a professional cook could specify it in print without apology, and the forty-minute boil with onion, carrot, clove and bay is essentially a way of giving factory produce a house-made broth to sit in.