Happy 4/20 (Lima Bean Respect Day)!

Happy 4/20! Yeah, I know the date is generally used to refer to a holiday for a special kind of green, but this blog is about old recipes. I looked for other holidays and discovered that 4/20 is also Lima Bean Respect Day. I'm not sure how to respect a lima bean, really, but since eating them is the only interaction most people have with limas, I'll go with that.

Unfortunately, most of my cookbooks just explain how to boil limas and advise cooks to maybe put some butter on them if they want to go all-out. Not exactly thrilling recipes. Luckily, my doorstop of a book Mary Margaret McBride's Encyclopedia of Cooking Deluxe Illustrated Edition (1959) offers far more suggestions. (The book's unwieldy size means I had to photograph rather than scan, so some of these recipes will look wonky, but that's life.)

Since this is an older cookbook, it has plenty of recipes that are attributed to another country with questionable degrees of authenticity, like Brazilian Lima Beans.

At least these sound like they'd taste pretty good. (And a recipe I found by a food blogger who specializes in Brazilian cuisine is at least somewhat similar, in that it too flavors the beans with bacon, onion, and garlic.) I'd say this counts as respecting lima beans, at least, and maybe Brazilian culture too? 

If your late April day is gloomy and you want to brighten it up, the book offers Lima Sunshine Casserole.

I guess the creamed corn is the sun? Maybe the photograph of this recipe will help me figure it out.

Or maybe, since this is a black-and-white photo, it will just end up looking like a bowl full of grayish glop. In any case, I'm kind of surprised the recipe developer didn't amp up the "sunshine" element by working chopped egg yolks into this one. Or pineapple. Or both. You know how the old recipes are.

If you want a good, old-fashioned white-sauce-and-chopped-up-eggs casserole, though, don't worry.

Last Minute Lima Supper has you covered. All the lima bean, white sauce, and hard-cooked egg you want, along with the mid-century staples of American cheese, ham, and pimientos (to fancy it up).

My favorite recipes, though, are those old-fashioned sandwich fillings, from back when people would consider pretty much any random foodstuffs chopped up and mixed with mayonnaise to be acceptable, so long as the glop was served on bread and referred to as a sandwich. First, there's the simple sandwich filling. 

It's perfect for when you have the munchies, but the cupboards are mostly empty. Just drain some canned beans, mix with pickle relish and mayo, and slather onto bread. Hopefully the munchies are sufficiently strong that you can wolf this down without having to experience it too fully.

If you're feeling fancier, though, there's this majestic creation:

Okay, you're probably staring at this and wondering if I've accidentally uploaded some kind of medical image that you definitely do not want to know more about (but at least it's not in color).  Don't worry. These are just Lima Soufflé Sandwiches.

Why you'd want to go to the trouble to whip up egg whites, then add American cheese, mayo, and other seasonings, just so you could slap the airy concoction on top of lima beans on toast before broiling the whole shebang, I have no idea. Maybe it's just more respectful to cover lima beans with a puff of egg whites before you eat them so they won't know what's happening until it's already too late?

Has this post been sufficiently respectful of lima beans? I'm not sure, but at least I haven't put them in a fruit salad flavored with horseradish and lemonade concentrate or made them an ingredient in a fruitcake. That's about as respectful as I get...