Succotash ravioli bathed in buttery tomato sauce is a summery stunner
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Do you have such love for any seasonal ingredient that as soon as you see it, you have to make one particular dish before anything else? I have few. When heirloom tomatoes show up, it’s a classic Southern sandwich. Sour cherries? Pie. Strawberries? One friend and I have started an annual shortcakes-for-dinner tradition.
When I find fresh lima beans every summer, it’s time for succotash.
Succotash is a little like gumbo: It has a long, rich tradition, and yet variations abound. In New England, it was once connected to the fall harvest, with a likely place on the very first Thanksgiving table (probably with dried field corn and perhaps native cranberry beans). But it’s become much more of a summertime dish, and in the South, where cooks have adopted it as their own, in addition to the requisite corn and shell (usually lima) beans you’ll often see such inclusions as tomatoes, okra, cream, bell peppers and bacon.
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As Yankee magazine wrote a few years ago, “It’s likely you’ll never be served the same bowl twice, and no recipe is wrong — at least according to the chef.”
It may come as little surprise to those who have followed my column, but my favorite piece of the succotash puzzle is not the fresh sweet corn, as much as I love it; it’s the beans. And they need to be those buttery fresh limas, not the starchier dried ones (although I love those, too). I’m lucky enough to live in a city with such a vibrant farmers market scene that I know at some point I’ll see them for sale already shelled, which is a godsend for those of us who’d rather not spend all that time doing it ourselves. If I don’t think I’ll get to the succotash within a few days, I freeze the beans.
A few years back, I saw a friend post on Instagram about an impromptu al fresco dinner in which she served cheese ravioli she had stirred into succotash. Brilliant! Then I had another thought: Why not stuff the ravioli with the succotash instead? Rather than make my own pasta, I employed a favorite shortcut, store-bought wonton wrappers. I decided to include some vegan cream cheese in the filling for richness (and a little tang), and pulled out the cherry tomatoes to make a light, buttery, quick sauce.
The result is a summertime pasta that evokes all the glories of succotash, whether you’re in Georgia, Maine – or somewhere in between.
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Source: The Washington Post
