Monday, February 2, 2009

Sufferin' Succotash

Ever since I heard Sylvester the Cat exclaim "sufferin' succotash" (well, it was more like "thufferin' thuccotash" given his lisp) on Looney Tunes, I had long wanted to know what "succotash" was.

Succotash has its roots in Native American cooking. The term comes from a Narragansett word that means "boiled corn kernels". You'll get a different recipe for it depending who you ask, but corn and beans are the star ingredients. The word may have entered the American vernacular when this frugal style of cooking became popular during the Depression era, though I don't have enough evidence to back this up.

I also couldn't find any definitive recipe for succotash, so I improvised my own. Since corn was the most common denominator, I chose to hand-shuck fresh corn. It gives me great satisfaction to pop out whole kernels of corn, even though it somehow makes me think of teeth falling out. My choice of bean was the lupini bean, which I also manually popped out of their shells.

Some bite-sized cubes of chicken breast were lightly seared first and onions were thrown in as an aromatic. I added a modest amount of chicken stock to keep the chicken from burning or drying out. The corn and lupini beans were put in, then to add some color, I chopped up some baby bell peppers. I gently simmered the pot until the chicken was cooked through. Last but not least, no herb goes better with chicken than dill, so a few fronds were chopped and mixed in near the end.

I think the dill made this dish as sprightly as it turned out to be. It's evocative of summer, which is a welcome distraction from the brutal Canadian winter. I'd like to think that other people might find this dish soothing as well.

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