Mason-Dixon Recipes

Baked Seaside Beans

"Some people are fat, some people are lean
But I want you to show me the person who doesn't like butterbeans, Yay!

         — B-52's, "Butterbean," 1983.

Butter beans are lima beans. No arguments, please. They are. For anyone in the southern United States or in the United Kingdom, this will come as a surprise because lima beans are called butter beans there. Since I live in the South (although a transplant), I always refer to them now as butter beans.

When my mother made homemade barbecue baked beans, she used a large, flat and yellowish white variety of lima beans widely used in North and South Carolina called "Seaside" beans. That was many years ago, and today I only found one source on the web. But I did find a similar recipe using Goya butter beans, so that might be an acceptable substitute.

There are actually two types of butter beans, the Sieva type and the Lima type. The Sieva type comes from Meso-American neo-tropical lowlands (Mexico to Argentina) and is a small-seeded variety. Often called baby lima beans, their domestication took place around 800. Around 1300, cultivation had spread north of the Rio Grande, and by the 1500s, the plant began to be cultivated in the Old World. The Lima type is found in the western Andes and was discovered in Peru. They may have actually been the fist plant brought under civilization, around 2000 BC, which produced a large-seeded variety (my Mother's Seaside butter beans).

Since the lima bean were discovered in Peru, whose capital is Lima, it makes you wonder if the actual pronunciation should be LEE-ma (how the capital of Peru is pronounced) rather than LIE-ma. The reason is because during the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru, lima beans were exported to America and Europe with the boxes of such goods place of origin labeled "Lima, Peru." Not understanding the Spanish origins of the name, Euro-Americanized pronunciation took over. Despite the origin of the name, when referring to the bean, the word "lima" is generally pronounced differently from the Peruvian capital.

I have yet to discover where the term "butter bean" came from. Perhaps it was the buttery taste or some rebranding campaign at work. Regardless, they have high nutritional value and taste great, especially when you coat them with a homemade barbecue sauce like my mother did.

INGREDIENTS

3 cans Seaside butter beans (or some other butter bean)
2¹/₂ cups hot water
¹/₂ lb bacon, browned and drained
¹/₄ cup chili sauce
5 tbsp brown sugar
5 tbsp molasses
2 tsp dry mustard
2 tsp salt
1 tsp onion powder

DIRECTIONS

Spread butter beans in bottom of a casserole dish and add bacon and hot water. Combine remaining ingredient and add. Bake 1 hour at 350ºF, uncovered. Eat entire dish by yourself.

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