Home › A Calendar of Dinners › August 22
August 22
Menu: Vegetarian; Succotash French Fried Potatoes; Tomato Jelly Salad; Orange Marmalade Ice Cream; Caramel Cake; Coffee Succotash-Boil 1 dozen ears of of corn for 3 minutes. Cut corn from cob, taking very small piece from top of each grain, then press out pulp. Mix this with an equal quantity of nicely cooked lima beans; add Crisco, salt and white pepper to taste; reheat and serve.
A summer succotash built on the old trick of scraping the cob rather than cutting whole kernels, which gives a creamy dish without cream. A few notes on quantities and fat.
- The hinge: milk the cobSlicing only the tips off the kernels and then pressing out the pulp releases the starchy "corn milk" and leaves the tough hulls behind. Skip that step and you get a bowl of loose kernels rather than the thicker, creamier mixture the method aims at.
- Three minutes is a blanch, not a cookingThe ears go into boiling water only long enough to set the kernels so they cut cleanly. The pulp finishes cooking during the reheat, which should be gentle — a few minutes over low heat, stirring, since corn starch scorches quickly.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell it. Crisco in 1913 was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold as a neutral all-purpose fat; the modern product is reformulated and no longer contains trans fats. Butter is the obvious substitute here. Reckon on 2 to 3 tablespoons.
- Lima beans"Nicely cooked" means fresh green limas simmered until tender, roughly 20 to 30 minutes depending on age. Frozen baby limas are the practical modern stand-in and need about 10 minutes. Dried limas, soaked and simmered, give a heavier, mealier dish.
- QuantitiesA dozen ears will give you somewhere in the region of 4 cups of pulp and kernel once scraped, so you need about the same volume of cooked limas — roughly 1 1/2 lb frozen. That makes a dish for eight or so as a side, which suits the family-dinner scale of this calendar.
- White pepperConventionally used in pale dishes, where black flecks were thought untidy. Black pepper will do if you don't mind the specks, though it tastes noticeably different from white.
- ServingSuccotash sets and thickens as it stands, so hold it over low heat or in a double boiler and loosen with a spoonful of milk or the corn cooking water if it stiffens.
Succotash is one of the few dishes in American cookery with an unbroken Native origin in its very name: it is generally traced to the Narragansett msickquatash, meaning boiled corn kernels, and the pairing of corn with beans reflects the way the two were grown and eaten together across eastern North America long before European settlement. By the time this page was printed the dish had become a plain New England summer standby, which is exactly why it appears here — The Story of Crisco (published by Procter & Gamble in 1913) worked by inserting its new hydrogenated shortening into recipes every reader already knew, and the "Calendar of Dinners" section supplied a full year of menus so that a housekeeper reaching for a late-August dinner would find Crisco waiting in the succotash. The cob-scraping method described here is often said to have been common in nineteenth-century American kitchens and to have faded with the arrival of canned and frozen corn.