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Succotash in Winter

Succotash is a winter dish of lima beans and corn simmered with butter, flour, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lima beans and corn 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 ↓

Succotash in Winter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the dried lima beans and dried corn.

  2. Place the beans in a kettle and cover them with cold water.

  3. Put the corn in a tin pan and cover it with cold water.

  4. Set the tin pan on top of the kettle with beans.

Cook

  1. Boil the beans for 15 minutes.

  2. Drain the beans and cover them with boiling water.

  3. Cook the beans until tender (about 30 minutes).

  4. Add the corn to the beans.

  5. Cook the beans and corn together for 15 minutes.

Season and finish

  1. Add salt and pepper.

  2. Add a dressing of butter and flour rubbed together.

  3. Alternatively, use cream or milk thickened with flour.

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. Lima beans + corntop 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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Corn + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Dried lima beans
Form the bulk of the dish and become tender and creamy when simmered.
Dried corn
Adds sweetness and tender kernels that combine with the beans.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the liquid a smoother mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid so the dressing clings to the beans and corn.

The step that matters

Cook the beans until tender before adding the corn. Dried beans need prolonged simmering in water to soften fully, since their starch gelatinises slowly. Adding the flour dressing to undercooked beans leaves them firm and the sauce uneven.

Swap the lima beans

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Beansfits better
  3. Black-eyed peafits better
  4. Lima beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, pepper, butter, flour. 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.

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