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Winter Succotash

A 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 ↓

Winter Succotash

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the lima beans and dried corn.

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

  3. Put the corn in a tin pan and cover with cold water, setting it on top of the kettle of beans.

Cook

  1. Boil the beans for 15 minutes, then drain and cover with boiling water.

  2. Cook the beans until tender, about 30 minutes, then add the corn and cook both together for 15 minutes.

  3. Five minutes before serving, add salt, pepper, and a dressing of butter and flour or thickened cream or milk.

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
Provide the main body and starchy, tender texture of the dish.
Dried corn
Adds sweetness and tender kernels that cook alongside the beans.
Butter and flour
Flour thickens the butter into a dressing that gives the dish a creamy coating.

The step that matters

Adding the dressing five minutes before serving. Flour thickens liquid through starch gelatinization when heated, but it can clump if added to hot liquid without being blended smooth first. Adding it near the end keeps the dressing from over-thickening or separating while the dish holds its texture.

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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