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Mother's Succotash

A stew of corn, lima beans, salt pork, and seasonings, served as soup or thick vegetable.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Mother's Succotash

Ingredients

Directions

Make the succotash

  1. Boil the corn cobs in 3 quarts of water for 20 minutes.

  2. Remove the cobs and add the cut corn and lima beans to the water.

  3. Add salt, pepper, and sugar.

  4. Simmer for 1 hour or until the mixture reaches your desired consistency.

Finish and serve

  1. Add a little cream just before serving.

  2. Serve thin like a soup or thick as a vegetable.

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 + porktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,069 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Lima beans + porktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together139 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

Lima beans
Become tender during simmering and thicken the dish as their starch releases into the liquid.
Corn
Adds sweetness and body, and its starch helps thicken the cooking liquid.
Salt pork
Renders fat and smoky flavor into the water, seasoning the whole dish.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel when stirred in at the end.

The step that matters

Simmer until the desired consistency. Starch from the corn and beans thickens the liquid as it simmers, so timing controls whether the dish ends up soupy or thick. Stopping too early leaves it thin; simmering too long can make the beans mushy and the mixture pasty.

Swap the lima beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (corn, pork, pepper, sugar, cream):

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Chestnutfits about as well
  3. Peanutfits about as well
  4. Lima beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, pork, pepper, sugar, cream. 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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