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Concordia Swiss Chard
Prepare white stalks exactly as for plain swiss chard, combine with highly seasoned white sauce and pour on toast in middle of rather deep platter or chop dish. In the meantime, cook green leaves like spinach, chop very fine, season highly, adding butter liberally, and arrange in egg sized balls around edge of dish. Serve very hot; or, press cooked and seasoned leaves into ring mold, tip out on round chop plate and fill center with creamed white stalks.
A two-part treatment of one vegetable: stalks creamed on toast, leaves buttered and shaped. The recipe assumes you already know the book's "plain swiss chard" method, so the working details are left out.
- Split the chard firstThe hinge of the dish is separating the thick white ribs from the green leaf before any cooking. Strip the leaf away with a knife or by hand, then cut the ribs into 1-2 inch lengths.
- Two different cooking timesRibs need roughly 8-12 minutes in salted boiling water until a knife slides through with no resistance; leaves need 2-3 minutes, or just until collapsed. Cooked together the leaves turn to mush before the stalks are tender.
- Drain the leaves hardChopped chard leaves hold a great deal of water and will not hold a ball or turn out of a mold if that water stays in. Press them in a sieve or twist in a towel before seasoning.
- "Chop dish"A chop dish or chop plate is a large round platter, the name usually said to come from serving chops. A roughly 12-inch round platter with a slight well works; the deeper the better, since the creamed stalks run.
- Highly seasoned white sauceA medium bechamel, about 2 tablespoons each butter and flour to a cup of milk, made stiff rather than thin so it clings to the stalks on the toast. "Highly seasoned" here would most likely mean salt, white pepper, a scrape of nutmeg or a little mustard and cayenne.
- Butter liberallyFor the leaves, count on 2-3 tablespoons of butter per pound of raw chard. The butter is what binds the chopped leaves enough to hold a shape.
- The ring mold versionPack the hot leaves firmly into a buttered 4-5 cup ring mold, let it stand a minute or two, then invert onto the plate. It will only unmold cleanly while everything is hot and well pressed.
- QuantityReckon about 2 lb of chard with its ribs intact for four servings, plus four slices of toast. Chard bought as loose leaves may have too little rib to make the creamed half worthwhile.
Swiss chard is one vegetable that behaves like two, and cooks have exploited that for centuries: the ribs were treated like asparagus or cardoon, creamed or sauced, while the leaves went the way of spinach. This entry belongs to a strain of early twentieth-century American cookery writing that prized composed presentation -- egg-sized balls of greens ringing a platter, a ring mold turned out and filled -- as a way of making a cheap garden vegetable carry a course on its own. The vegetable's own name is a bit of a fiction too: chard is a beet grown for leaf and stalk instead of root, and the "Swiss" is often traced to nineteenth-century seed catalogues distinguishing it from French varieties rather than to any Swiss cooking tradition.