Thanksgiving Part 2 — Succotash

A while back, before I retired from the Division of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell University, I helped write answer for a nutrition Q&A website that we called Nutriquest. Was looking over my files and found a four-part series I wrote for Thanksgiving. Here is the second part, lightly edited.  The next parts will be posted over the coming days.

In the US, the fourth Thursday of November is devoted to a very special holiday, Thanksgiving. The day is notable in that it is our national occasion to give thanks for the food that we have—and to help those who do not have enough food, here in the US and throughout the world.

Because food is such a central part of Thanksgiving, and because the Thanksgiving foods have such an interesting history, weaving together nutrition, agriculture and culture, we thought that we would take the opportunity this week to provide you with a series about the Thanksgiving foods, with a couple of recipes and cooking hints thrown in.

Succotash, a combination of corn and beans, is an extraordinarily nutritious dish that the Native Americans presented to the Pilgrims on that first feast of Thanksgiving.

What is succotash?

Succotash is the name given to a number of different dishes combining beans and corn (also known as maize in other English speaking countries). Present day recipes for succotash—and the frozen version I remember from my childhood—combine corn with lima beans. However, the dish the Native Americans introduced to the Pilgrims was certainly not prepared with lima beans—these beans were not available in the Northeast at that time—but was originally prepared with other large beans. You can find recipes on the web featuring black-eyed peas or black beans instead of lima beans—in fact from a nutritional point of view (as we will discuss below) most any fleshy bean will do.

Succotash made with red kidney beans. Image from Wikipedia.

Where does succotash come from?

The name for this mixture of corn and beans comes from the Wampanoag word msíckquatash meaning a boiled stew with corn. The Wampanoags are the Native American people the pilgrims encountered on Cape Cod.

The Native American versions of succotash were made with meat or fish in addition to the beans and corn. However, many of the important nutritional properties of succotash, discussed below, remain if you cook the dish without meat.

The beans that I grew up thinking of as part of succotash—lima beans—were certainly not the original beans used by the Native Americans in the Northeast. Lima beans are a more tropical bean, from Mexico (the small limas) and South America (the larger limas). They do not grow in the climate of New England. They need warm weather, a good amount of warm moisture (no cold water welling up from the ground), and a fairly long growing season—in other words, not the growing conditions prevalent in New England during the Little Ice Age when the pilgrims arrived in America.

We should note that the Native Americans of the Southwest developed strains of lima bean that were drought resistant to suit their climate. One of these is known as Hopi Orange, and is cultivated by the Hopis in the Southwest—see: https://coloradoplateauhorticulture.wordpress.com/2014/02/12/phaseolus-lunatus-how-the-hopi-brought-us-the-ancient-mesoamerican-lima-bean/

Why combine beans and corn in a meal?

Beans and corn in a meal together can give you better quality protein than can either of these foods alone.

What do you mean by better quality?

The proteins we eat are broken down into amino acids, which the body then uses to build its own protein. Our bodies are not able to manufacture most amino acids from scratch—as a result we must eat them pre-formed.

In order for our bodies to build new protein we need to eat the amino acids in the right proportion for making new proteins—as it turns out, this is the proportion found in foods of animal origin, such as meat or eggs, but not the proportion found in individual plant foods.

Then how do you get better quality proteins from plant foods?

By combining certain types of plant foods—and in particular, a grain and a legume, in other words, the corn and beans in succotash.

Grains and legumes are both fairly good sources of protein, because the part we eat is the part that is going to become the new plant. The new plant needs to rely on stores of protein in the seed until it has grown roots and can obtain its own nitrogen for creating amino acids.

Different plant foods have different proportions of amino acids—corn, rice and wheat lack the amino acid lysine, and may have low amounts of two other amino acids, threonine and tryptophan, but they have abundant quantities of methionine. Beans and peanuts have good amounts of lysine, threonine and tryptophan, but are short on methionine. By eating corn and beans together (or rice and beans, or tofu and rice...or a peanut butter sandwich!), you can have each plant food provide what the other is lacking. As a result, with these combinations you can obtain the proper proportion of amino acids, even if you don't eat much if any animal proteins. The process of combining two or more foods in order to get the right proportions of amino acids is called complementation.

Are there other important properties of succotash?

Corn and beans contain some important nutrients in addition to amino acids. These include generous amounts of folate and beta-carotenes. They also contain iron. But remember, the minerals in plant food are less well absorbed than the minerals in animal food, and decrease absorption of iron from animal foods, so don't count on the iron in corn and beans to help you get enough.

As you probably know, carbohydrates (and beans have plenty of them) cause blood sugar levels to go up after a meal. This is a normal process, but diabetics may have high blood sugar levels even before they eat anything, and may not be able to manage rises in blood sugar effectively after they eat. Beans are special in this respect: ounce for ounce of carbohydrate, beans do not raise blood sugar levels as much as other carbohydrate containing foods do. Further, it seems that if you eat beans with other carbohydrate-containing foods (for example corn), you won't get the rise in blood sugar levels you would see with the other foods alone. So beans may play a role in controlling blood sugar, and are an excellent food choice for diabetics. A note of caution, though, for our readers with diabetes—don't let eating beans take the place of monitoring your blood sugar levels, and don't count on beans alone to do what a well regulated well-balanced diet will do for your overall diabetic control.

So succotash is good for me—now how do I make succotash?

There are dozens of websites with recipes for succotash, which you can find using your favorite search engine. Ones we particularly enjoyed reading about are:

• Plimouth succotash from the Plimoth Plantation, a living museum of 17th century Plymouth, Massachusetts—the recipe feeds 150 people!
• and the succotash recipes provided by NativeTech.org—Native American Technology and Art—a treasure trove of recipes handed down by Native Americans.

As I peruse all these recipes, certain common features stand out:

• The proportions of corn to beans are equal—for example, two cups of corn to two cups of beans. This proportion is important for maintaining both flavor balance, and for the complementation of amino acids to work correctly.
• Many of the recipes call for (skim) milk ; in some recipes milk is added to the extent that the succotash may be transformed into a chowder—also a good choice.
• Virtually all the recipes have either leek or onion in them—the addition of one or the other will add exciting flavor to the dish, courtesy of activating TRPA1.
• A number of recipes include diced red peppers—as you can imagine this adds a note of color which looks very festive next to the brown and yellow of the beans and corn.
• We were interested to note that some recipes included walnuts, chestnuts, or another nut (a tasty choice would be hazelnuts)—if you like nuts, they will add to the healthfulness of the dish.
• Many recipes go heavy on the salt—remember that you can always add lemon juice to the dish instead of salt; in fact this particular dish is really "picked up" by the judicious addition of lemon juice; we suggest that each person should be allowed to put in the amount of lemon they wish because people differ tremendously in how much lemon flavor is "just right" for them.
• And a basic note—as we mentioned above, succotash is really a Summer dish, rather than a Fall dish, because in much of the country the fresh sweet corn season and the fresh lima bean season have passed by now. However, to enjoy the best taste possible, see if you can at least find fresh corn, and use dried beans rather than frozen ones. But even if you are stuck to using frozen vegetables, remember that you can add other fresh flavorful ingredients to your heart's content—and most of all,

Enjoy!

...More tomorrow!