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Succotash

Succotash is a stew of sweet corn, Lima beans, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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 ↓

Succotash

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the corn

  1. Hull and silk the sweet corn carefully.

  2. Cut the corn from the cob and place it in a stewpan with enough water to cover the cobs.

Cook and finish

  1. Add the washed Lima beans to the stewpan.

  2. Boil for 10 minutes.

  3. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

  4. Thicken with a mixture of flour and water rubbed smooth.

  5. Add butter to taste before serving.

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. 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

Sweet corn
Provides the main body and sweetness of the dish.
Lima beans
Add starchy body and a firm, buttery texture to the stew.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid as it is heated, giving the succotash a fuller consistency.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel at the end.

The step that matters

Thicken with flour and water. Flour must be mixed smooth with water before it goes in, because dry flour clumps when added to hot liquid. Lumps stay unless the paste is fully blended first, and starch only thickens evenly once it is dispersed in the liquid.

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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