Recipe: Sussex County Beans

A friend and I have been swapping our ideas on comfort food and I remembered one last night I need to add to the list: gravy. I love gravy! And for dinner last night, I had a gravy sandwich — a couple pieces of honey wheat berry bread smothered in gravy. Hmmmmm.

But this post has nothing to do with gravy or with pets. It has to do with another comfort food: Sussex County Beans.

When I was about 10 years old, I lived with my folks and three brothers in Frankford, Delaware located in Sussex County. We had a babysitter named Mrs. Bunting for my little brother, Lad. Lad couldn’t pronounce “Bunting.” It came out as “Bumpy” and so Mrs. Bunting became Bumpy to us all. Lad and I, we were the youngest of the four, were sometimes left in Bumpy’s care on afternoons my mom had to be other places with my two older brothers. She was always cooking something or another and I learned a lot about cooking, even at 10, from her. The big two are Slippery Dumplings (no cake dumplings in southern Delaware) and Sussex County Beans.

It’s a cold day today here in Texas; it was sleeting earlier — a good day to pull out the crock pot and make Sussex County Beans. Essentially the recipe is lima beans, corn, tomatoes and bacon with a touch of sugar cooked slowly together. I don’t eat bacon very often but I thought I could make a pot of Sussex County Beans today… and then some Black-Eyed Peas by New Year’s and use up a small package of bacon.

Seems most people I meet don’t like lima beans, so why are they so expensive in the frozen food section of the grocery??? $5 for two pounds. I bought the dried ones: $1.49 for one pound. The dried ones don’t retain their wonderful green color, so the end result will not be as pretty with the dried ones, but great stuff anyway.

Here’s how I am cooking them today:

BUMPY’S SUSSEX COUNTY BEANS

Ingedients:
1-lb dried lima beans
1/2-lb frozen yellow corn (or about 6 ears of fresh corn cut off the cob)
3-4 roma tomatoes (any tomato will work; romas have less seeds)
4 slices of bacon cut into smaller pieces
2 Tablespoons sugar
Salt and pepper to taste

Directions:
Add all the ingredients to your crock pot, fill with plenty of water (because the beans are dry and will absorb lots of water), cook on high until the liquid comes to a boil, then reduce the heat to low and let things cook for a few/couple hours.

Bumpy served them as a side dish, but I use them as my entree with some bread or rolls. I especially like a crusty bread with a soft inside.

It’s hard for me to say how many this will serve because I will eat them all in a couple days, but maybe 6-8 servings.

If you google Sussex County Beans, you will not find this recipe — or I didn’t, but I found this:
Grown primarily for processing, lima beans are planted on more acres in Delaware than any other vegetable crop. Baby limas and Fordhook varieties are used in processing; the small amounts of pole lima beans grown in the state are strictly for the fresh market.

Enjoy!