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Lima Bean Salad
If the beans are green, boil them in salted water until tender, then drain and drop in very cold water until wanted; this helps to preserve the color. When cold, drain and dry on a towel, then dress with a French dressing and serve garnished with tufts of parsley and a little finely chopped and sprinkled over.
Dried lima beans may be used; pick them over, wash and soak over night in cold water, cover with fresh cold water and simmer slowly until tender; drain and set aside until cold, then add four tablespoonfuls of olive oil and turn over until each bean is well coated, add one tablespoonful of vinegar, one-half of a teaspoonful of salt, one quarter of a teaspoonful of white pepper, one teaspoonful of finely chopped chives and two teaspoonfuls of finely chopped parsley.
A straightforward bean salad in two versions, fresh and dried. The only real pitfall is texture: limas turn to mush a minute or two past tender, and mushy beans will not hold a dressing.
- The hinge: dress the beans cool, not cold-from-the-fridgeThe recipe has you chill the beans, then oil them before the vinegar so each one is sealed and stays whole. Follow that order, but let them come to room temperature before serving or the oil will be dull and pasty.
- Fresh lima timingShelled fresh or frozen baby limas need 8-12 minutes in well-salted water; large limas 15-20. Test one at the earliest point and keep testing, since they go from firm to collapsing quickly.
- The cold-water shockDropping them in very cold water does preserve color. The recipe leaves them there 'until wanted'; the longer they sit the more water they take up, so drain once they are cold and dry on a towel as directed.
- Dried limasThe recipe names no quantity of beans, so the dressing has to be judged by eye; four tablespoonfuls of oil and one of vinegar will coat a modest bowlful, not a whole pound of dry beans. Simmer at a bare tremble rather than a rolling boil, which splits the skins. Expect roughly 45-60 minutes after soaking.
- French dressingIn this period the term means a simple oil-and-vinegar dressing, not the sweet orange bottled product. The dried-bean version below it gives the proportions plainly: four parts oil to one part vinegar.
- The garnish sentenceA word is missing in the original: "a little finely chopped and sprinkled over" means a little finely chopped parsley. Reserve some of the parsley from the bunch you use for the tufts.
- ChivesIf you have no chives, the green tops of scallions are the closest substitute in this dressing. Avoid onion, which will dominate the beans within an hour.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of beans, so yield can only be estimated from the dressing, which suits a small bowlful. It keeps a day refrigerated, though the parsley will darken.
Lima beans reached American tables from South America by way of the Caribbean trade, and the name is generally traced to Lima, Peru, from which shipments were dispatched in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By the turn of the twentieth century they were a staple American garden crop in both the large flat form and the smaller "baby" or sieva type, and cookbooks of the era routinely gave paired instructions for fresh beans in season and dried beans out of it, as this one does. The dish itself belongs to a broader fashion of the 1890s and 1900s for cold vegetables dressed with oil and vinegar and served as a distinct salad course, an idea borrowed from French practice and much promoted in American household manuals of the time; the recipe calls for tufts of parsley and for coating each bean in oil before the vinegar is added.