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Succotash
To a pint of cooked corn add a pint of cooked and seasoned shelled lima beans. 1-41-41-2 cup butter cup flour teaspoon salt
A creamed succotash, printed in the terse shorthand these insurance-company booklets favoured. The ingredient list has come through as run-together fractions, and one item is missing outright.
- Reading the garbled lineThe string "1-41-41-2" is three fractions set solid: 1/4 cup butter, 1/4 cup flour, 1/2 teaspoon salt. Nothing is missing from the quantities themselves.
- The missing liquidButter and flour in equal measure is the opening of a white sauce, but no milk is named; the omission may be an assumption on the book's part or a printing loss. As a rule of thumb, 1/4 cup each of butter and flour is a medium-to-thick binding for about 2 cups of milk, though the original gives no figure and I will not invent one for it. Judge by eye and stop when it coats the vegetables.
- The hingeCook the flour in the butter for a minute or two before any liquid goes in, and add the milk gradually off the heat. A raw-flour sauce is the usual failure here, and once the corn and beans are folded in you cannot whisk lumps out.
- Lima beansFresh shelled limas want 20-30 minutes at a simmer; frozen baby limas want 8-10. Dried limas need soaking and are a different vegetable in texture. "Cooked and seasoned" means they should already taste of salt before they meet the sauce.
- CornA pint is two cups, roughly the yield of four medium ears. Cut kernels from cooked cobs, or use drained canned or thawed frozen corn. Add it last and only heat it through; corn boiled in the sauce loses its snap.
- YieldTwo pints of vegetables plus sauce serves six as a side dish, four if it is standing in for a main.
- SeasoningHalf a teaspoon of salt for the whole dish is modest by present taste, and no pepper is named at all. Black or white pepper, a scrape of nutmeg, or a little of the bean cooking water in place of some milk all sit well within the idiom.
Succotash comes from a Narragansett word, generally given as msickquatash, meaning boiled whole kernels of corn; the dish of corn cooked with beans is one of the few genuinely Indigenous North American recipes to hold a permanent place in Anglo-American cookbooks. The creamed version here, with its butter-and-flour sauce, is the early twentieth-century domestic-science treatment of nearly every vegetable, and its appearance in the Metropolitan Cook Book is not accidental: the booklet was produced by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and given free to policyholders as part of a broad public-health campaign, so recipes were chosen to be cheap, filling, and reliant on shelf-stable or garden staples.