Does “manteca” mean butter or lard in Spanish?

Watch out for manteca. In Argentina and Uruguay it is the normal word for butter, the soft yellow kind you spread on bread. But in Spain and Mexico, manteca means lard, the fat from a pig. So the same word points to two very different foods depending on the country. The safe word for dairy butter everywhere is mantequilla.

This video is Rioplatense (River Plate) Spanish, so when she says yo pongo manteca en la sartén (“I put butter in the pan”) to fry eggs, she means butter. A speaker from Spain would expect lard there, and would say mantequilla for butter instead.