In the food store, though, you always see butter beans packaged by some company with a name like “Southern Pride” or “Dixie Queen,” and they’re brown. Limas come in ordinary Damyankee packages and are green.
Butter beans have some vague connection with Down South, where I think they can grow and eat them fresh. The former Attorney General was commonly referred to as “Jeffery Butterbeans Sessions” by one of the lefty political news sites I favor.
(Your ol’ dad has the right idea. Toss a bounty of smoked pork into the saucepan with water, beans, onion, and pepper, and you can skip the chicken broth.)
I couldn’t taste the cicada I ate over the gagging and dry heaves. All mental, for sure.
I’ve had toasted crickets. It was while back and I think most of the legs had been removed. They’re totally unobjectionable, bland even. Maybe a little nutty. After frying, the texture is crispy.
Ukelele Ike, I only referred to plain boiled Lima beans. You can cook almost anything with onions and red pepper and it’ll be delicious. Plus I said I’d eat them mixed with other veggies.
Pulykamell, insects as food may be a thing, but none for me thanks.
I see conflicting accounts of this. Most sources I see say they are exactly the same thing, both being Phaseolus lunatus. (Perhaps you mean slightly different cultivars, as even with the same genus and species, you can get quite a lot of variety: see brassica oleracea.) Do you have a source listing a different species? In my experience, they are exactly the same, with “butter bean” being a better name for marketing purposes, since almost everybody loves butter, and “lima” has endured decades of negative publicity.
The latter. Look up “chapulines.” Here’s a picture of a cricket taco. They can also be eaten on their own. I admit, it does look a bit unappetizing, but I think I could get used to it. Like I said, shrimp ain’t pretty either.
Butter beans are also called that due to the pale color, which is reminiscent of butter. Culinarily speaking, lima beans are small and green whereas butter beans are large and tan. I’ve seen butter beans listed as both P. luantus and P. limensis but it’s unclear which is which.
I’m used to limas being large and yellowish, but baby limas being smaller (like half the size, maybe a little bigger than kidney beans) and greenish. Limas to me are always the biggest of the common dried beans.
These are the type of dried limas I grew up with. (Though not always that brand.) It looks like there is a good deal of variation as to what a lima bean is. Maybe butter bean is a subset of Lima? I do know the ones that come in the frozen veggies tend to be the green ones, but I assumed that’s because they were baby limas or something.
