A chard day's night

As the weather turns cool and everyone’s thoughts turn to romantic, candlelit dinners for two in front of a seductive fire, there is one thing on my mind: why do South Africans insist on calling chard, spinach? And spinach, baby spinach? And if you wanted real, actual baby spinach, as opposed to adult spinach, what on earth would you ask for? Foetal spinach?  It’s a bit like our habit of calling traffic lights robots, but much less endearing.

The connection between chard and romantic dinners is a very direct one of course.

If you’ve got as far as persuading the woman of your dreams to come to your home, alone, at night, you’re not going to spoil it all by giving her beans on toast and a lager.  You’re going to think very carefully about the menu.

Having already seduced the woman of my dreams, I am now willing to generously  share the secret of the World’s Most Irresistible Romantic Fireside Dish. Warning: this will not work on a vegan. And don’t even think about just substituting tofu.

You take a fillet steak – I prefer ostrich – and sear it quickly on both sides in a blazing hot cast-iron pan. Then place it in a bowl on top of a pile of spinach leaves and cover. The heat of the meat wilts the spinach just a little, and the juices slowly seep into the leaves.

Once the meat has rested you lay the spinach leaves in a layer on a serving dish; slice the steak as thin as you can, and tastefully arrange it on top of the bed of spinach; drizzle with extra virgin olive oil; sprinkle with salt; serve; and take a deep breath.

Something about the combination of eating raw vegetation and bloody meat resonates on a primitive, animal level. It’s a dish that inspires copious consumption of  wine – especially if you’re liberal with the salt -- and as the crunchy spinach and morsels of  pink fillet melt in her mouth, your girlfriend’s heart will be filled with yearning. What’s more, it’s pure Atkins diet, for whatever that is worth.  Don’t mention this yourself, of course.  That’s Dating 101, right?  Because her response will be, “oh, so you think I’m a little chubby”.

Now this is all very well. But what if you get home after shopping for the ingredients, unpack the bags, and realize to your horror that the packet clearly marked “spinach” actually contains Swiss chard? This is not a dish that works with chard. Spinach and chard are not interchangeable. Both are green and leafy, but there the similarities end. Spinach is light and tender; chard is tough, fibrous and bitter. Feed your girlfriend raw chard and no amount of Leonard Cohen background music is going to help you.

Inevitably, you will have run out of time to go back to the shops and look for the BABY spinach. Your evening will have been ruined. Your life will be over.

How many suicides can be attributed to the great chard/spinach deception? We may never know.  But surely it’s time to start a campaign to call vegetables by their correct names?

 We could wear little green ribbons on our lapels and host workshops addressed by earnest academics who would point out the blindingly obvious, that chard is a member of the beet family and has nothing whatsoever to do with spinach, apart from their shared reliance on photosynthesis.

I suspect the whole thing is a result of sloth and greed. Spinach is hard to grow, see. It doesn’t like heat, it doesn’t like cold, it hates getting too much sun, and it’s very picky about how much water it gets. Chard on the other hand is virtually a weed. Just try stopping it from growing. It flourishes all year round, through blizzards, droughts and earthquakes. 

So obviously our vegetable retail mafia simply decided that when consumers asked for spinach, they would just give us chard. And charge us for spinach.