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Succotash
1 pint (2 cups) lima beans 1 pint (2 cups) corn pulp I oz. (2 tablespoonfuls) butter 1 pint (2 cups) lima 1/2 pint (I cup) boiling milk Salt and pepper to taste Cook the beans until tender in boiling salted water, add the corn pulp and cook for thirty minutes, then add the milk, butter, salt and pepper and simmer for five minutes longer. Stir constantly, as it burns easily. Pour the succotash into a hot serving dish and serve at once.
This dish is particularly good prepared with dried or canned beans and either dried or canned corn. If dried vegetables are used, allow to soak over night in cold water to cover, then drain and boil.
To remove the pulp from the ears of corn without the hull, cut down through the center of each row of kernels with a sharp knife, then press out the pulp with the back of the knife, leaving the hull on the cob.
For a change, add one and one-half cupfuls of tomato pulp or one chopped onion.
Succotash is a dish borrowed from the Narragansetts and called by them "m'sickquatash."
A straightforward two-vegetable dish, but the printed ingredient list has a typesetting fault and the corn timing belongs to an era of tougher field corn.
- The duplicated lineThe list gives "1 pint (2 cups) lima beans" and then "1 pint (2 cups) lima" again. This looks like a repetition introduced in typesetting or transcription rather than a second ingredient; use 2 cups of lima beans total.
- Corn pulp timingThirty minutes is far too long for modern sweet corn, which turns starchy and dull. With fresh or frozen kernels, add the corn to the cooked beans and give it five to eight minutes; reserve the long simmer for dried corn that has been soaked overnight.
- The hinge: constant stirringThe warning is real. Corn pulp is largely starch and milk solids scorch, so once the milk goes in keep the pan moving over low heat and do not walk away. A heavy-bottomed pan helps more than anything else.
- Corn pulp versus kernelsThe scoring-and-scraping method described yields a starchy, milky pulp rather than whole kernels, which is what thickens the dish. If you cut kernels off whole instead, the succotash will be thinner; a tablespoon of the scraped cob milk or a light mash of some beans restores body.
- Lima beansFresh limas are seasonal and scarce; frozen baby limas are the practical substitute and need about 15 minutes in salted water. Dried limas soaked overnight will take 45 minutes to an hour.
- Boiling milkHeating the milk before it goes in keeps the dish from dropping off temperature. Whole milk behaves better than skim here.
- The tomato variationIf you add the cup and a half of tomato pulp, add it with the corn rather than with the milk, so it has time to cook down; tomato acid meeting hot milk can cause it to curdle.
- YieldAbout five cups finished, serving four to six as a side dish.
The name is genuine Algonquian: the book's "m'sickquatash" is one of many transcriptions descending from a Narragansett word recorded in the seventeenth century by Roger Williams in 1643, usually glossed as broken or boiled corn kernels, and the dish of corn cooked together with beans is documented among Northeastern peoples well before English settlement. Corn and beans were grown together in the same fields and eaten together, a pairing that happens to be nutritionally complementary. What changed by the time of a book like this one is the pantry: the recipe assumes dried and canned goods are not just acceptable but preferable, which tells you how thoroughly the commercial canning industry had reshaped American home cooking by the early twentieth century. The addition of milk and butter is generally regarded as a New England refinement rather than anything Indigenous, and the tomato-and-onion variation at the end shows succotash already drifting toward being a general vegetable stew.