The traditional side dish made from corn, lima beans, and bell peppers is succotash.
Succotash is a North American vegetable dish whose essential ingredients are sweet corn and lima beans or another shell bean. Bell peppers, tomatoes, onions, potatoes, and seasonings are common additions, so recipes can look quite different while still belonging to the same tradition.
The name comes from the Narragansett word sahquttahhash, associated with boiled or broken corn. Indigenous peoples in what is now New England are credited with developing the dish, and Native communities taught versions of it to English colonists in the 1600s. Corn and beans were also among the Indigenous “Three Sisters” crops, grown together with squash.
Succotash became especially associated with New England cooking and appears on some regional Thanksgiving tables. It was also valued as an inexpensive, filling dish, particularly during the Great Depression. A useful nutritional detail is that combining a grain, such as corn, with a legume, such as lima beans, supplies all essential amino acids.