Swiss chard is the same species as beetroot, and may not be Swiss
Chard is simply beet grown for its leaves instead of its root, which is why it answers to names like leaf beet, silver beet and perpetual spinach. Nobody is sure where the 'Swiss' came from. One theory credits a botanist who was not even Swiss. In Dalmatia it is hailed as queen of the garden.
Botanically chard is Beta vulgaris, the species that also gives beetroot, and it splits into two cultivar groups. The Flavescens Group, Swiss chard, has thick leaf stalks often cooked separately from the blades; the Cicla Group, spinach beet, is leafier. Carl Linnaeus described it in 1753, and since then its rank has been shuffled between subspecies, variety and convariety so often that the synonym list is long.
The word chard comes from 14th-century French carde, from Latin carduus, the artichoke thistle. The Swiss label is murkier. Some attribute it to a first description by Gaspard Bauhin or by Karl Koch, though Koch was German. Either way, the Swiss do cook with it; capuns, a traditional dish from the canton of Grisons, uses the leaves.
Gardeners value its stamina. Chard is a biennial, and in the Northern Hemisphere it can be ready from April and keep producing until a hard frost below about minus 4 degrees Celsius, outlasting kale and spinach. Leaves are cut as needed, and most plants give three or more crops. Stalks come white, yellow or red. Green cultivars such as Fordhook Giant tend to outyield showy red-ribbed ones like Ruby Chard, and Rainbow Chard is actually a mix of varieties, not one.
Cooks use raw leaves in salads or as a wrap, while boiling or sautéing softens their bitterness. Dalmatian cooking puts chard into stews and the savoury pie soparnik. A 100 gram raw serving has about 20 kilocalories and very high levels of vitamin K, and chard ranks among the most oxalate-rich vegetables, around 480 mg per 100 grams of fresh leaves. The Babylonian Talmud praised a cooked dish of it as good for heart and eyes, and more so for the intestines.
Source: Chard
