Skip to main content
Main

Lima or Butter Beans

A simple boiled bean dish seasoned with butter, flour, salt, and black pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Lima or Butter Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Shell the beans and soak them in cold water for at least 1 hour.

Cook the beans

  1. In a saucepan, bring enough boiling water to cover the beans and add a little salt.

  2. Boil the beans steadily for 1 hour if young, or 1.5 hours if old.

Finish and serve

  1. Drain most of the water, then rub 1 teaspoon of butter with 1 teaspoon of flour.

  2. Simmer the mixture for 10 minutes, then add salt and black pepper 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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 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

Lima or butter beans
Provide the main body of the dish, becoming tender and creamy when boiled.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the finished beans a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid when rubbed with butter and simmered.

The step that matters

Simmer the butter and flour mixture. Flour must be cooked for several minutes to lose its raw taste and to thicken properly. Simmering for the full 10 minutes lets the starch swell and the sauce become smooth rather than pasty or floury.

“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.

More lima beans recipes

Creamed 13Boiled 8Canned 8Dried 6Stewed 6Baked 3 See all 92 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes