Foods We Love : Chard by the Yard

When my mother stopped keeping up the kitchen garden, we found out who our real vegetable friends were. It was the Swiss chard, above all, that kept sprouting up year after year all over the old garden patch. One year we discovered that a leaky faucet in a neglected area behind the garage was supporting a veritable forest of the stuff.

Fortunately, we loved chard. My mother had only one way of serving it, boiled (at too high a temperature and in too much water, I’d now say), drained and seasoned with melted butter and fresh lemon juice. The butter ennobled the faintly astringent leaves, the lemon cut their velvety earthiness, and you had the ideal dish of greens.

Later on I discovered Swiss chard wasn’t, properly speaking, a chard--that is, a cardoon, an edible thistle that is the ancestor of the artichoke--and there wasn’t anything particularly Swiss about it, except maybe that it would grow better in Switzerland’s climate than cardoons. It’s the most ancient form of beet, grown only for the leaves--so ancient that the Spanish name for chard ( acelga ) comes, by way of Arabic and Aramaic, from the ancient Babylonian language.

I also found there were a lot more things you could do with chard than serving it with butter and lemon. You could put it in pie with raisins (the Provencal tarte aux blettes ). You could blanch the leaves and stuff them with rice or ground meat, as if they were grape leaves, or with tabbouleh, or a flour-thickened mixture of the diced, poached stems, mashed potatoes and goat cheese.

The world center of chard cookery turned out to be Iraq and Syria. There it gets stewed and stuffed, also thrown into various soups, particularly lentil soup (along with coriander, garlic, butter and lemon juice--that combination again).

Many people in that part of the world prefer the thick, white stems (you might call them the ribs) to the green leafy parts. As a result they have a solution to the problem my mother never solved: the fact that the stems cook much more slowly than the leaves. They simply strip the leaves off and cook the stems separately until tender but still crisp. The chard stems are often mixed (with or without the briefly cooked leaves) with garbanzos, garlic and coriander seeds, seasoned with lemon juice and olive oil.

That dish, silq bi-hummus , is tasty served hot and maybe even better served cold (with extra lemon), because the chard stems are translucent white and pleasingly crunchy. It’s a swell dish, but I still like chard best served plain and simple with butter and lemon.

CHARD, PLAIN AND SIMPLE 1 bunch chard Butter Lemon wedges

Wash chard leaves. Strip green part off white stems with paring knife. Cut stems across grain into 1-inch lengths and chop greens roughly, if desired. Cook stems in boiling water until tender-crisp. Set stems aside. Pour water from pot, place greens in pot, cover and cook over medium heat about 2 to 3 minutes, removing cover occasionally to stir. Drain greens, mix with stems and serve with butter and lemon wedges.