Bettes... or is that blettes?

Bettes are also called blettes. I don't know why there are two spellings. In French, they're also called poirée, and there are other local names for them. In English, they're Swiss chard. Or silverbeet. They aren't Swiss at all evidently, and have been grown and eaten along the Mediterranean coast since Roman times.

As I've said, we are growing chard this spring. It's been very successful. Walt planted a lot of seeds under a cold frame (une mini-serre) back in March or April. They grew well, and at one point I thinned them. I pulled 12 or 18 plants and transplanted them into a row in the plot where I've also planted collard greens and mustard greens.

A bucketful of chard I picked yesterday morning

Since then, I've thinned those original blette plants twice more. We ate a batch of them 10 days ago, and yesterday I pulled out about 4 lbs. of the big green leaves with their white ribs. Now the remaining plants have room to grow, and the leaves will get even bigger.

Meanwhile, the little plantlings that I uprooted and transplanted in a row after the first thinning are also doing great and those leaves are getting big too. Luckily, we have a freezer. I can cook the leaves and stems and freeze batches of chard for the winter. Since most recipes call for blanching or cooking the chard first in boiling water, we'll be able to use the leaves and stems in a lot of different ways.

I washed the chard at least 6 times
to make sure all the sand and bugs were gone.

Speaking of leaves and stems, in France people sometimes cook them separately. When you have really big chard leaves — bigger than the ones we have at this point — you pull the green leaves off the ribs and cook the leaves like spinach, which is a related green.

Then you cut the chard ribs, called les côtes or cardes, into inch-long sections, de-string them if they are stringy, and cook them in boiling water. Cooked, you put them in a baking dish and cover them with grated cheese. Then you put the dish in the oven and let the top brown so you end un with what is called un gratin. That would be chard ribs au gratin.

The greens plot in the garden: from l. to r., a row of chard,
two rows of collards, and one row of mustard greens.
Those are sunflowers in the back.

A lot of French recipes nowadays call for chopping up whole chard leaves and cooking the green parts right in with the white ribs. That's what I've been doing so far, because the leaves are still young and tender. I cook collard and mustard greens the same way, and soon it will be time to start thinning those rows of greens. We'll cook and eat the tender young plants we pull out and then let the remaining plants grow big.

Other than eating chard as a green leafy vegetable like spinach or other greens, cooking it au gratin, or chopping up the leaves to put in soup, what can you do with it? In Nice and other places, people make a tarte aux blettes — a Swiss chard pie. That's what we are going to do with the chard I picked and cooked yesterday.

Blettes

There are two kinds of tarts made with chard. The most straightforward is a kind of quiche, and that's what we're planning to do. The ingredients are a pie shell, eggs, cream, cooked chard, bacon (a.k.a. lardons), and grated cheese.

The other kind is a sweet dessert tart with chard, eggs, raisins, pine nuts, sliced apple, sugar, and grated cheese. Sounds interesting, doesn't it? We are going to save that for another day. We have plenty of chard growing in the garden so there will be time to make that tart and many other preparations involving blettes this summer.

Look at this list I just found on a Web page:

• Aillade de blettes aux anchois
• Blettes à la sauce mornay
• Blette à la saucisse
• Blettes à la tomate
• Blettes au citron
• Blettes au gratin
• Blettes au thon
• Blettes aux herbes
• Blettes sauce mousseuse
• Chaussons aux feuilles de blettes
• Côtes de blettes au four
• Côtes de blettes au gratin
• Côtes de blettes au lard
• Feuilles de blettes à la poêle
• Feuilles de blettes farcies
• Feuilles de blette farcies à la viande
• Gratin de côtes de blettes
• Hachis poitevine
• Lasagnes de thon à l'huile
• Pounti
• Reste de feuilles de blettes
• Salade aux trois legumes
• Tian de feuilles de blettes
• Tourte aux blettes
• Tourtes de feuilles de blettes
• Salade aux trois légumes