Butter Beans

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, this is Elliot from Charlottesville, Virginia.

Welcome, Elliot. What can we do for you?

Hey, well, I have a little bit of a question that comes from my time spent down in Denmark, South Carolina.

At just about every family gathering, there would be butter beans served.

And butter beans as we know them are the smaller, light-colored beans.

But then I’d come back up to Virginia, and I’d go to the store looking for them,

And I saw that they must have been mislabeled,

Because what I knew as butter beans were now labeled as lima beans.

And the lima beans were labeled as butter beans, and I just didn’t know what was going on.

Oh. Now, wait a minute.

Now, what color were the lima beans?

So the lima beans, as we know them in South Carolina, are the larger sort of cream-colored beans.

Mm—Really?

Like large as in the size of a quarter? What are we talking about here?

Large, a little bit larger than a quarter, maybe a little bit smaller than a half dollar.

Oh, okay, big ones then.

Yeah.

And then the butter beans for you are the smaller ones, size of a dime maybe?

Yes.

Okay.

But it’s flipped when you go to Virginia.

But it’s flipped when I go to Virginia and eat.

And even in South Carolina sometimes.

We’ll go to the Piggly Wiggly.

We’ll go to the frozen section.

And they will have two separate bags of what appear to be the same beans labeled as butter beans and then lima beans on the other bag.

Well, common names are really interesting, particularly when it comes to food items,

Because we’re not all one country when it comes to labeling our food.

They’re not consistent.

We’ve had many, many calls about this, and fortunately for us, some of the work has been done to figure out where exactly this is happening.

And it turns out that in the American South, butter bean is used to refer to lima beans, almost exclusively in the American South.

Lima beans meaning what color?

Well, that’s the thing is what we’re talking about.

Butter beans are typically the small beans.

Does that sound right?

Yeah.

Yeah, so the color, it’s greenish, grayish, whatever color.

So they’re all lima beans.

Just get this, but they’re just a different size of lima bean,

A different subspecies of lima bean, as I understand it.

So in the American South, a butter bean is a small lima bean.

Now, lima bean is kind of like the canonical term for it,

And butter bean is the regionalism.

So lima bean is far more common in the United States, North America,

The rest of the world for this particular kind of food item, all right?

But in New England, a butter bean is a wax bean.

And what does a wax do?

They look like green beans.

Oh, they’re the color of like a white semi-clear candle wax.

I hated those two.

Right.

Okay.

So I can understand where if you’re on a dialect, like where two isoglosses meet,

Where two different regions, their speech patterns mix,

I can understand why you could go to the store and these producers have figured out,

Oh, in order to sell these, I need to label them both ways.

It particularly depends on where in Virginia you are,

Where you may have the more cosmopolitan where you’re getting people from all over the country

Coming in with different expectations for what a butter bean is or what a lima bean is.

Yeah, it better be clear packaging.

Well, there you go.

So I guess I can rest assured that everything is safe down in South Carolina,

Calling butter beans, butter beans.

Yeah, butter beans.

I guess so.

As long as everyone understands, right?

Yeah, we all understand.

Take care now.

Will do.

Bye.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

We know at your last family gathering something came up,

And it had to do with language.

We want you to tell us about it, 877-929-9673,

Or tell us about the strange food labeling you saw in the grocery store,

Words@waywordradio.org.