By Victor Greto
Whenever people think about the foods that came to European civilization after its first encounter with America in the late 15th century, potatoes, tomatoes and even tobacco always top the list.
But lima beans?
Also known south of the Mason-Dixon line as “butter beans” when dried and soaked in water, and cooked with, well, butter, they may be the Rodney Dangerfield of New World veggies, but they’re culturally important enough to merit an American folk song.
“Just a bowl of butter beans,” one song begins. “Pass the cornbread if you please/ I don’t want no collard greens/ All I want is a bowl of butter beans.”
More later.
Delaware’s largest vegetable crop – more than 14,000 acres, or a third of the country’s production — has just begun its growing season in Sussex County. It ends in September.
And nobody knows the troubles it’s seen.
Well, one person has.
Emmalea Ernest, the University of Delaware cooperate extension associate for vegetable crops in Georgetown, is trying to develop new varieties of lima beans that taste better (phew!), and grow faster and bigger.
More importantly for Delaware growers, she wants to rid the state’s greatest-yielding variety, baby lima beans, of a nasty disease, to adapt it better to Delaware’s weather conditions and also make profitable the tastier varieties knows as Fordhook and pole lima beans.
Ernest is breeding and cross-breeding Fordhooks so they might better survive the profit-killing humidity of Delaware summers, and working on baby limas to help them resist a disease disarmingly called “downy mildew.”
For the record, Fordhooks are tasty, plump, large pale green beans; baby lima beans, a separate variety, are less fat and half the Fordhooks’ size.
“Lima beans are an important crop for Delaware,” said Ernest, 29. “They aren’t grown in very many places.”
Mostly here (the Delmarva peninsula), California and Tennessee.
In California, baby lima beans are grown in the state’s central valley south of Sacramento. But it’s the state’s success with the chubbier and tastier Fordhooks in Ventura County on the Oxnard plain that makes Delaware growers hungry for the potential profit from that crop.
Delaware growers have graced many other states and countries with the fruit of their bounty. Although lima beans invariably make the top 10 “most hated vegetables” lists, they’re in the top 5 “most nutritious” ones, behind only broccoli, spinach and brussels sprouts. Ugh.
Still, lima beans rate high in molybdenum, dietary fiber, tryptophanand and manganese, as well as a good source of iron, folate and potassium.
No, we’re not sure what half of these things are, but the U.S. Surgeon General (the same person who spoiled smoking for everyone who was cool in 1940s black and white movies) says they’re important. And there’s practically no fat in them.
All of the 3,500 acres of beans that Stanley West, owner of Charles H. West Farms, Inc., in Milford, grows are the baby lima beans. He stopped growing Fordhooks a decade ago.
“The Fordhooks don’t like our climate,” West said. “They do a better job in California because the area is more arid, dryer, and it gets too hot and humid here.”
Fordhooks originally thrived on the coastal plains of South America.
“They tend to drop their blossoms [during the humidity of July and August] so they don’t get a good set [of beans],” he said. “Every fourth or fifth year you get a good crop, but you can’t make very much money if they’re only producing every fourth and fifth year.”
Enter Ernest, a Lancaster, Pa., native who attended Penn State and Michigan State universities, and who came to Sussex County.
“One of my goals is to keep the Fordhook seed-type, and introduce some traits from other lima bean varieties that would allow it to grow well under Delaware conditions,” she said.
Ernest began doing that three years ago after raiding 219 varieties or “lines” of lima beans kept by the USDA. She crossed these with Fordhooks in her greenhouse, and came out with less than two dozen promising potential varieties.
“I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the Fordhooks,,” she said. “I had some last year that looked great, fat and lots of pods.”
Ernest still has to do “variety trials” with the Fordhooks.
That is, she’ll plant about a dozen Fordhooks in part of her acre-field next year to see how they survive the humidity and fight fungus .
She has just begun testing out baby lima bean varieties in the field to see how well they fight different strains of the downy mildew fungus. Twelve potential varieties recently bred have been planted alongside some of the standard varieties currently in production.
“I hope she’s successful,” West said. “If we can get a good variety that can take the heat, maybe we can grow them again some day.”
But it’s not only growers who want Ernest to be successful.
Consider chefs like Ed Hennessy, culinary arts department chair at Delaware Tech’s Terry Campus in Dover, who, like many of us, didn’t like them when he was a kid, but has since seen the light.
“You got to get them fresh,” he said. “That’s what turned me around about them.”
Hennessy had grown up eating the mushy, tasteless canned variety. But, about three decades ago when he first came to Delaware and worked for the DuPonts, he tasted Fordhooks, which were popular then.
“They’d have fresh limas, right out of their garden,” he recalled. “That’s when I first realized how good they are.”
For the fresh ones, there’s about a two-month window, from August to September.
But they’re fine frozen, too, if you treat them right, Hennessy said.
You thaw them in the refrigerator, “and just sauté them to order,” he said, either with bacon or onion or black pepper.
“If you boil it when they’re rock hard, you lose some nutrients,” and overcook them. They’ll probably taste like the ones you had when you were a kid.
As shown by these two even-more charming stanzas from a folk song, there is so much potential out there.
Bread and gravy is all right/ A turnip sandwich is a delight/ But my children all still scream/ For another bowl of butter beans.
See that Lady over there/ With the curlers in her hair?/ She’s not pregnant as she seems/ She’s just full o’ them good ol’ butter beans.
Better yet, sauté butter beans with corn and lard or butter and you get a Native American dish and Sylvester the Cat’s favorite food, sufferin’ succotash.
Turnip sandwich, anyone?