Succotash

My children will not eat succotash, which puzzles me because it is such comfort food. The photo is from Southern Food.

I remember my mother directing a succotash production line one summer at a farm in northern New Jersey. Ears of corn and fresh lima beans were arriving in brown grocery bags, in abundance. There were pots of boiling water on the stove, and we were all--father, brothers, mother, shucking corn, tossing it into the pots, and shelling beans to the same end.

Then someone had to take a carving knife and slice the cooked kernels off the husks. The last task was to combine equal amounts of corn and limas into plastic freezer bags, which would then go into the freezer chest behind the picnic table in a room off the kitchen. This was my grandfather's farm, not ours, but we loved it as though it were our only home, and the memories of the summer vegetables are as strong as the longing to swim in the pond or fish for trout in the brook or make echoes up on the hill in the evening. I notice, about the vegetables, that there was nothing exotic, such as broccoli rabe, or Vidalia onions, or bok choy. There must have been zucchini--as a child maybe I blocked it out. But this was in the 1970s, before Mrs. Child and her food revolution had truly begun.