Skip to main content
Dessert

Dry Succotash

A dish of corn and lima beans cooked with eggs and butter, served hot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Corn and lima beans work together. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 222 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Dry Succotash

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the kernels from the corn.

  2. Mix the corn with the lima beans.

Cook

  1. Boil in salted water until cooked.

  2. Drain in a colander and keep warm in a covered pan.

Finish and serve

  1. Beat the eggs and pour over the corn and beans.

  2. Add the butter, salt, and pepper, and mix well.

  3. Serve hot.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Corn + lima beanstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together222 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Corn + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Lima beans + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together414 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Lima beans + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together468 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Corn
Provides the sweet, tender bulk of the dish.
Lima beans
Add starchy body and a creamy texture to the mixture.
Eggs
Set when heated, binding the corn and beans together.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour and moisture.

The step that matters

Beat the eggs and pour over the corn and beans. Eggs set when heated, so they need to be folded through the hot vegetables while those are still warm. If the vegetables are too cool, the eggs will not bind properly and the dish may turn out wet and loose.

Swap the lima beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (corn, egg, butter, pepper):

  1. Beansfits about as well
  2. Lima beansthe original
  3. Walnutfits about as well
  4. Almondfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, egg, butter, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Corn CakeCorn Cake90 recipesCorn Starch CakeCorn Starch Cake89 recipesCorn CakesCorn Cakes22 recipesGreen Corn PuddingGreen Corn Pudding14 recipes