On June 18, 1878, my great-great-great-uncle Albert was sitting on the front porch of his lovely Austin home, Las Ventanas, surveying the bounty of his garden. In a letter to his dear wife, who was visiting kinfolk in Tennessee, he wrote that the honeysuckle and roses were in full bloom and that there was “a good many butter beans on the vines, in fact the vines are loaded.”
Don’t butter beans sound lovely? So creamy, rich and smooth. But unfortunately, growing up I knew them by their less-delicious name, lima beans. And like many people, I was never a fan.
So what exactly is it about this much-loathed legume that make people go, “Blech!” when it’s mentioned? Could it be the word lima? The bean, which hails from South America is named after the capital of Peru. Yet instead of pronouncing it lee-ma, as that city is known, we instead say lie-ma, which sounds like either a disease, “Sorry, I’m not going to be at work this week, I’ve got a nasty bout of lima,” or a crazy old aunt whose name is invoked to discipline unruly children: “If you don’t eat your beans, you’re spending the day with old Aunt Lima!” Or perhaps it’s the texture, which can be both tough and mushy; the taste, which is bland; or the color, which is the sheen of old green linoleum circa 1968.
Read more »
Comments
Post a Comment