Lima Beans
To stew lima beans, put the beans in just sufficient water to cover them, stew gently half an hour, or till tender; add a little sweet cream and very little butter and season with salt and white pepper, or omit the cream, add butter and season with salt and white pepper.
A plain vegetable side written for cooks with fresh shell beans in hand. The one thing the recipe assumes and never states is that the beans are fresh-shelled, not dried, which changes everything about the timing.
- Fresh, not driedHalf an hour of gentle stewing only works for fresh or frozen shelled limas. Dried limas need soaking and roughly an hour to an hour and a half, and no amount of butter will rescue them at thirty minutes.
- "Sweet cream"Nineteenth-century kitchens distinguished sweet cream from sour; this simply means fresh, unsoured cream. Heavy or whipping cream is the closest match, and a few tablespoons is enough for a pound of beans.
- Just enough waterThe instruction to barely cover is deliberate. The beans should finish with a scant amount of starchy liquid left, which the cream and butter turn into a light sauce. Drowning them and draining throws that away.
- Keep it at a bare simmerA hard boil bursts the skins and leaves you with a pot of loose jackets and mealy fragments. Gentle is the operative word.
- Salt at the endThe recipe seasons after cooking rather than salting the water. Cooks long held that early salting toughened bean skins, though that belief is disputed.
- White pepperMost likely chosen for appearance, so black specks do not show in a pale dish. Black pepper works if appearance is not a concern; white has a different, earthier aroma.
- DonenessTender means creamy through the centre with no chalkiness. Lima beans are unpleasant undercooked and should never be eaten raw or barely warmed.
- YieldA pound of shelled beans serves four as a side dish.
Lima beans reached European and then American tables from the Americas, and the name is generally traced to the Peruvian port through which they were shipped; the large flat variety is still sold as Lima or butter bean, while the smaller sort is often called a sieva or baby lima. In American home cooking of the late nineteenth century they were a summer garden staple, shelled fresh from the pod in July and August, and this recipe offers two versions -- one with cream, one with butter alone.