top of the garden, in the pink and purple area (yes, indeed) was a chard plant almost 1.8 metres (6 feet) tall, flanked by two purple-tinted kales, slightly shorter. All three were the previous season’s crop, which were allowed to carry on growing for their statuesque beauty and fabulous colours. In fact, the stem and leaf stalks of the chard were close to a screaming shade of red, with just enough hint of pink to qualify for the theme of the area. (This is one of chard’s great qualities as a garden vegetable. It is very beautiful, especially if you grow varieties with different-coloured stalks.) Elsewhere in the garden there was a patch of the more sedate but classic white-stemmed chard, and in another corner still a scattering of what is known as a ‘rainbow mix’, with yellow, orange, white and pink chards mingling vividly. And all this beauty provides such good, and easy, food.
I was in the house for the peaceful environment and to find the time that I had been wilfully wasting in the city, for writing and reading. But this was to be a mutually beneficial arrangement, so I had chores as well. Two duties mainly: the cats and the garden. The cats were easy. I moved them out of the house, lecturing them on the potential joys of getting in touch with their inner tiger. The catflap, their portal between wild nature and indoor pampering, was temporarily sealed. Not wanting to be totally heartless, I gave them access to a tiny hallway where there would be mats to sleep on, and food to eat, albeit smaller rations than they were used to. Well, I reckoned, quickly getting up to speed on cat evolution, a fat lazy cat has no chance of finding that tiger. She needs some hunger motivation. Some great wise (and probably very rich) old man is bound to have said that.
The garden was another matter. I don’t garden. I admire and love those who do, and I know a lot of the theory, but I’ve never really got my hands dirty in one. Not the best person to leave in charge, then. I can do chores, if they are clearly laid out. So I did what I do in the restaurant kitchen – made a checklist for every day, with space to tick off jobs as they were completed: watering, ventilating the greenhouse, moving plants here and there for light and shade, covering and uncovering new plantings depending on weather, recording temperature and rainfall levels. (Golden rule: never go to bed with an unfinished checklist.) Yes, that’s right: I was Met Man for West Cork briefly.
The first night, it lashed down, heavy rain falling in bucketfuls. The wind whipped around the house and every door latch twitched noisily all night. In my few fitful snatches of sleep, I imagined it was the cats coming for me, all tigered up. In my more frequent wide-awake state, I felt a tiny bit sorry for them. Next morning, there was more water in the rain collection jar than had fallen in the entire previous month. The cats were alive and dry, if a little sorry for themselves. I took a ramble round the garden, trying to be masterly but not really knowing what I was looking for. I mean, in the city I would have been looking for roof tiles and broken downpipes, maybe glass everywhere. So, to my untrained eye, it all looked fine, a bit windswept maybe, but fine, until I came to the chard. One entire plant had fallen over. It wasn’t broken, more like it had stood up to the wind and rain for a long time, then gradually tilted sideways until it lay flat on the ground, dejectedly unable to fight any more, yet relieved that the battle was over. It reminded me of seeing Spencer Tracy in The Old Man and the Sea, putting a gloomy downer on one Christmas holiday afternoon in my youth. Watching the film, you cheer him on for an hour or so, but then, seeing that he is dying a slow death, you just want it over and done with. I did the only thing a self-respecting cook could do – snipped off a handful of leaves for lunch (just a simple dish of wilted chard flavoured with lemon and pine nuts). Two days later when the plant had made no recovery, I took the best of the rest and made a very tasty gratin.
Chard grows willingly and can be harvested by taking a few leaves at a time. It will kindly go on producing more. It has never made much of an impact as a commercial crop, except in farmers’ markets to a small extent. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It really does need to be used very fresh. This is true of the softer greens in general, but especially of chard because the stalks start to become tough and stringy in a day or so after picking, and the leaves lose their sweetness. It’s worth mentioning too that while the coloured chards will add to the beauty of your garden, their stalks are thinner and tougher than the white variety. I rarely cook the coloured stalks at all.
Spinach is a good starting reference point for what to do with chard, though the leaves are coarser and hold their texture and substance better than spinach. This makes chard leaves really good in tarts, frittata, stews, soups and pancakes, and as a wrapping for ‘parcels’ like dolmas and timbales. The flavour also has a stronger, earthier element than spinach.
Chard stalks are a vegetable in their own right, and it is worth thinking of them as such once the stalk is about 3cm (1 1/4 in) wide below the leaf. If the stalks seem stringy, it is possible to peel away the thin layer of stringy film. At that size and beyond, I like to trim the leaves off and braise the stalks by slicing them across 2cm (3/4 in) thick, then putting them in a heavy pan with olive oil, white wine and stock to barely cover, and cooking over a low heat with the lid on until the stalks are soft and succulent. In soups or stews, the stalks don’t need to be cooked separately, of course, but just added earlier than the leaves.
Chard, whether using leaves, stalks or both, is wonderful with eggs, tomatoes, earthy Puy lentils, olive oil and spices, and with almost all cheeses from strong blues to feta, and from hard, aged cheeses to soft fresh ones. It is also great in any variation of hearty Italian soups and stews, rich as they are with olive oil and herbs, and often laced with lemon juice.
Back at the farmhouse, there was one other chore, which I never managed to tick off. (So much for the golden rule of the checklist.) I was to kill snails and slugs at dusk, the scissors method being optional. I tried it the first evening, bolstered by a few glasses of wine. But I managed to fool myself that I couldn’t find more than a half dozen of the enemy, that the problem was exaggerated, and I admit to simply chucking those few over the fence. I went on fooling myself on that one for the rest of the tour of duty. At least I was honest enough not to tick the checklist.
Popeye’s fighting fuel – spinach or whiskey?
While we were diligently eating our cabbage here in Ireland, children in other parts of the world, particularly America, were shovelling back the spinach. Nutritionally, its strongest card is iron, which it has in spades, if you’ll excuse the pun, and is surely what that crazy fiend Popeye was supposedly benefiting from when he glugged down those cans. Was that guy invented by a committee of lunatic nutritionists? I know it must have seemed like a good idea to have a cartoon character that encouraged kids to gobble up their greens, but couldn’t they have come up with a role model with rather more admirable characteristics? Popeye was a rough sailor, not the brightest fish in the sea either, with a shockingly poor grasp of grammar and vocabulary. OK, he loved his girlfriend, and that’s a sweet message, but I can’t help thinking she might have been better off with someone else. Whenever there was a problem, and sometimes when he merely imagined there was one, he lashed back a couple of cans of spinach and came out, fists blazing, walloping people clear out of the scene with ferocious violence. Whiskey would have had the same effect. (In fact, he surely must have been drinking off screen, in one of those seedy waterfront dives populated by cartoon lowlife.)
As it turned out, the information that fuelled not only Popeye but also the enormous canned spinach industry was erroneous. Big time. When the US research of the 1890s was retested by German scientists in the 1930s, it was found that the original results had put a decimal point in the wrong place, multiplying the potential benefits of spinach tenfold. Just in time to start a huge industry. Oh, dear. You wouldn’t want to be cynical, would you? If only Popeye’s foes were aware that he was fuelling himself on a fallacy.
Spinach is still a highly nutritious vegetable, even so, and it does have a decent amount of iron. But even if it wasn’t so healthy, we would still eat it for its flavour and all-round usefulness. Spinach is, in many ways, the ultimate green. Granted, in the company of some of the other greens here, it may not seem a big hitter, having neither the complex flavour nor the strong texture of the likes of sprouting broccoli and black or Chinese kale. But that is not what spinach is about. It has a mild flavour and a soft texture, which makes it easily the most useful, multi-functional green. Available all year round now, spinach is almost always on the menu