Succulent Succotash

In the spirit of today’s NYTBR (a cleverly conceived How-to theme with essays by Augusten Burroughs and Dave Eggers and Kate Christenson) and the book I’ve just started by Caitlin Moran called How to be a Woman, I’ll write this post as a how-to: How to Make Succotash 1) Wipe from your memory any frozen corn-and-lima-bean desecration. Lima beans themselves are just outright despicable. Assuming succotash had to be made with them, imagine my relief when I consulted Fannie Merritt Farmer’s The Boston Cooking- School Cookbook (a 1924 edition I bought in upstate NY last summer) and saw the ingredient as boiled shelled beans. And no finer authority than Judith Jones in L.L. Bean’s Book of New New England Cookery also allows for shelled beans. 2) Don’t get yourself in a swivet if you come home with sugar snap peas instead of peas in the pod. Growing up in the suburbs, I couldn’t identify peas off the vine, if you paid me. We shelled the sugar snaps; there was enough for color, anyway. 3) Boil these tiny peas for under a minute and drain. Boil corn for five minutes—no more! Cut the kernels off the cobs, mix the kernels with the peas, a tablespoon or two of melted butter, a dash of salt and pepper, and serve.

4) Eat every bit at one sitting. Refrigerate even homemade succotash and the horrors of the old-time mess will come back to haunt you.