This weekend I was on salad duty at a BBQ so I made a bean salad as I often do. There's only one ingredient that is tricky to find and I usually just leave it out, but since I'm on my summer hols I actually had time for once to try and find them. Presenting;
HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER RUNNER BEANS
Runner beans are readily available in England but finding them here is trickier. Translator programs can't translate "runner bean" into Swedish because they give "löpande bönor" (running beans) which is probably helpful in an extremely specific situation. Wikipedia suggested rosenbönor as the Swedish translation, so I asked a few Swedish people if they've eaten rosenbönor and suspiciously they had not. I showed them pictures of runner beans, they had never seen them and couldn't give me a name. Brytbönor was one suggestion, but those are large green beans and not the flat runner bean. The confusion
stems from the fact that all of these similar beans (green, runner,
haricots, kidney, flageolet) come from the family Phaseolus vulgaris and Wikipedia lumps them all together unless you know what to search for and give a specific term.
I basically gave up after that.
But as the picture above can attest, runner beans do, in fact, exist here. They are called skärbönor (cut beans) presumably because you have to cut them into bits before eating. But they're bloody expensive and hard to find, so this supports the theory that Swedish people don't know what they are and don't cook with them. Just one of many foods that vary from place to place!
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