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Swiss Chard with Bacon
Wash and pick over Swiss Chard. Cook in boiling salted water, using just enough water to prevent Chard from burning. Drain and chop fine. Arrange in a mound on a chop platter, surround (crown fashion) with "hard-boiled" eggs cut in halves lengthwise, having cut side out. Cut a slice off the large end of each egg so that they will stay in place. Cut five slices of bacon in narrow strips crosswise. Try out one-third cup. Add one-fourth cup vinegar, diluted with one-fourth cup hot water, pour while hot over the Swiss Chard, scattering the scraps of bacon over top of mound.
A hot bacon-and-vinegar dressing over chopped chard, plated as a Sunday centerpiece. The instructions assume a cook who knows how greens behave, and a couple of the measurements need translating.
- Dress it hotThe rendered fat, vinegar and water must go over the chard while everything is still steaming. Poured warm rather than hot, the fat congeals into pale specks and the dish reads as greasy instead of glossy.
- "Try out one-third cup"This appears to mean render the bacon until you have a third of a cup of liquid fat. Five modern slices are unlikely to yield that much unless they are thick-cut — a few tablespoons is more typical — so either add extra bacon or accept a lighter dressing and reduce the vinegar and water proportionally.
- Stems and leavesThe recipe does not distinguish between them, but the ribs need three or four minutes' head start on the leaves. Slice the stems and drop the leaves in after, or the finely chopped result will be stringy in patches.
- Squeeze it dry"Drain" is doing a lot of work here. Press the cooked chard firmly in a colander or twist it in a towel before chopping, or the dressing will slide off into a puddle at the base of the mound.
- Vinegar strengthA quarter cup of vinegar cut with a quarter cup of hot water is sharp by current taste, and the recipe does not say what kind of vinegar to use. Add it in stages and stop when it suits you.
- A chop platterA large serving platter of the kind used for chops and meat. Any flat serving dish works; the trimmed egg halves are simply braced against the mound so they stand cut-side outward.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. Two large bunches of chard will cook down to roughly enough for four as a side dish; reckon about one egg per person, halved.
Hot bacon dressing poured over greens is one of the most durable techniques in American home cooking, generally traced to German-speaking settlers in Pennsylvania and the Midwest, whose Specksalat wilted lettuce, dandelion or endive with rendered fat and vinegar. Swiss chard suited it well: a leaf beet grown for both rib and blade, it stands up to summer heat long after spinach has bolted. The presentation — a mound crowned with halved hard-boiled eggs, their bases trimmed so they sit upright — belongs to the era's ambition of making a plain vegetable substantial enough to carry a Sunday table, when a cookbook's job was as much arranging the platter as cooking what went on it.