Lima beans, along with okra and beets, are part of a constellation of vegetables that many view as an evil sign in the food firmament. Bland starch bombs. Deadly slime. Puckery pickles that turn all they touch permanently pink.

Which of these weird sisters is the most wicked in the minds of a ketchup-eating public? That's debatable. But I would put lima beans first. In the very name echo the screams of thousands of schoolchildren.

But how about butter beans? Anything with "butter" in the name must be good, right?

It's all in the spin.

It worked for beets. When they became "root vegetables," they began flying off restaurant menus. The terminology even shifted my paradigm.

I have always loved the first two parts of the triumvirate. Even the slime, as part of what makes okra, okra.

My mother used to bake okra fresh out of my father's garden, pods left whole, dabbed with butter and sprinkled with black pepper. Talk about slime. The result looked like green slugs, but I liked it.

But I would not touch a beet. Until adulthood, my sole experience with them was as pickles -- quart jars of them that my mother put up in the summer and hid in my suitcase when I came home from college to visit.

I'd call when I found them: "Mama, you know I don't like those things."

She'd say: "Well, I figured someone up there would eat them."

Only if they could be covered with cheese and put on a pizza.

At a restaurant a few years ago, I ordered a dish that featured "roasted root vegetables." When it arrived, I spotted a chunk of ... beet. I felt betrayed by the language but took a bite. It was good. Sweet and earthy, not sour and slick.

Now I roast "root vegetables," even combining them in with seared beef and shaved Parmesan in a hearty salad. But I dare not speak their name, or my guests will give me that beet look, the one that says, "I thought this was a gourmet meal, not a school cafeteria."

I'm still working on marketing for okra. Perhaps "green french fries" for fried okra, or "grilled garden pods." Southerners used to call the small pods "ladies' fingers" -- that would fool the okra-phobic.

But butter beans are already there. That's what most Southerners call their kidney-shaped green things, and they look unlike the reviled limas. Butter beans are the delicate, tender green of new grass and, ideally, no larger than your index fingernail.

Some sellers emphasize their petite size by calling them baby butter beans. We like baby things. They're just precious. Think of how many bags of baby carrots are sold at supermarkets, even though they're actually full-size carrots cut down into stubs by a machine. (A real baby carrot looks like a miniature carrot with a tapered end, not like a gangster's cigar, but there goes marketing again.)

Someone who wrote a cookbook with butter beans in the title should know them, and Ronni Lundy does. Her book "Butter Beans to Blackberries: Recipes From the Southern Garden" (North Point Press, 1999) covers a galaxy of Southern foods.

Lundy says butter beans and limas are the same bean, but butter beans are varieties meant to be harvested earlier, when still small and tender. She writes that some parts of the South draw distinctions between baby butter beans and even smaller ones. In Alabama, you might hear people talking about "butter peas," or in South Carolina, discussing "sivvy" or "sieva" beans.

Most coveted are speckled butter beans, small beans with purple- or black-and-green mottled skin and an even creamier texture. One story goes that William Faulkner, while sitting in a Paris restaurant with a lush French meal before him, could think only of the speckled butter beans in season back home in Mississippi.

Southern growers also seek out varieties that mature at a smaller size. That may be because the smaller-seeded butter beans are more heat tolerant, according to the Virginia Cooperative Extension Service. Or it could be because we know they taste a whole lot better than those giant, starchy, Yankee limas.

Freshly shelled butter beans, so tiny and perfect they seem fit for a charm bracelet, taste sweet and, yes, buttery when cooked. The beans keep their shape, even when simmering in a pot of succotash -- fresh corn and butter beans -- or my favorite vegetable stew, which adds tomatoes, onions and another of the fearsome threesome, okra.

As she did with all vegetables except lettuce, my mother cooked butter beans the old Southern way: with fatback, and all day. Now, you do need to cook butter beans for a while to achieve the creamy texture that inspired their name, but it doesn't have to take forever. While the beans make perky companions for pork, I simmer them in plenty of water just until they're tender, a half hour to an hour, depending on the size and freshness of the beans, with a bit of butter.

I try to persuade people who have suffered through bowls of mushy, grout-colored limas to try a spoonful of butter beans, but this is not easy. We who have been enlightened must have patience, because those poor souls have been burned, bless their hearts.

(Freelance writer and cookbook author Debbie Moose is a former food editor for The News & Observer. Reach her at moosedj2001@yahoo.com.)

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