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Succotash (Open a pint can succotash)
Open a pint can succotash and place in a small saucepan with one gill cold milk, half ounce butter; season with teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper; mix well and let cook for ten minutes. Dress on a hot dish and serve.
A canned-goods shortcut from the era when tinned vegetables were still a modern convenience. Two things need adjusting: the measures and the seasoning.
- A gillHalf a cup, or 4 fluid ounces. Half an ounce of butter is one tablespoon.
- Cut the salt hardA teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of pepper for a pint of vegetables is far beyond modern taste, and canned succotash is already salted. Drain the can, start with a pinch, and season at the end.
- Drain the can firstThe recipe assumes the tinned liquor goes in with the milk. Drain it off so the milk actually tastes of milk.
- Keep it below a boilTen minutes of hard boiling risks catching the milk on the bottom of the pan. Warm it gently, stirring; ten minutes is plenty to heat through and let the butter emulsify.
- What succotash isCorn and lima beans, sometimes with a little green pepper. If you cannot find it canned, a cup each of corn kernels and cooked or frozen limas gives the same thing.
- YieldA pint can serves two to three as a side dish.
Succotash comes from the Narragansett msickquatash, roughly "boiled corn kernels," and the dish of corn cooked with beans is one of the clearest survivals of Indigenous North American cooking in the mainstream American kitchen. Corn and beans grown and eaten together is an old and nutritionally sound pairing, and colonial households adopted it early. What is striking here is the framing: by the time this book appeared, succotash had become something you opened rather than shelled, and the recipe's whole contribution is milk, butter and salt. Canned vegetables were a genuine selling point in the early twentieth century, and cookbooks of the period were unembarrassed about building instructions around them.