Tasty chard colors exotic plates

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Swiss chard, despite its name, isn't from Switzerland. Its wild ancestor came from the Mediterranean and Asia Minor. Although it looks like overgrown spinach, it's actually related to beets. Indeed, in Israel, where I first became acquainted with it, the greens are called beet leaves.

In English, chard is called Swiss because a 16th-century Swiss botanist first described yellow chard. Once exotic to North Americans, chard is now readily available in our markets. Yet many supermarket shoppers skip this vegetable, undoubtedly because they don't realize how valuable it is.

First and foremost, chard tastes great. Compared with other greens, chard is easy to love because the flavor is mild and delicate, with a touch of sweetness in the red-stemmed variety. The texture is also pleasing, with a bit of crispness in the leaves.

Chard is beautiful, too. Its glossy dark green leaves are sometimes crinkly and sometimes smooth. The most common kind has white stems, but a few years ago, I discovered in seed catalogs a colorful type called rainbow chard, with yellow and red stems in addition to the usual white. Now you don't have to garden to enjoy this pretty variety. It enlivens the produce bins of well-stocked supermarkets.

Chard's big leaves might seem intimidating, but cooks quickly find the size to their advantage. With fewer leaves to rinse, chard demands much less preparation time than the same amount of spinach. Yet chard cooks nearly as quickly as spinach, unlike other greens such as collards.

Very young chard leaves can even be served raw and are sometimes included in baby lettuce mixes.

In regions where chard is indigenous, cooks take advantage of it in seemingly countless ways. The large leaves are used as wraps to enclose fillings. A favorite Lebanese stuffing is composed of rice, chickpeas and tomatoes enriched with olive oil. The stuffed chard is then served cold. Sephardic (Mediterranean) Jews enclose beef fillings in the leaves and serve them hot. The idea of wrapping food in chard leaves is also popular in Mexico, where the leaves envelop tamale mixtures the same way corn husks and banana leaves do.

Around the Mediterranean, chard is also popular for pie fillings. I love rich phyllo pastries filled with chard and cheese, such as the Turkish-style boreks with Swiss chard, walnuts and feta prepared by Ozcan Ozan, author of "Sultan's Kitchen: A Turkish Cookbook" (Periplus). In "Mediterranean Street Food" (HarperCollins), Anissa Helou presents a tasty Genoese chard pie with ricotta cheese and sauteed onions.

Cooks in Provence, France, even serve chard in dessert tarts. In Nice, I enjoyed the delicious cuisine at an old favorite restaurant, La Mere Besson, where I sampled the local chard tart with grated cheese, rum-soaked raisins, pine nuts, bananas and apples. It's quite startling at first, but it grows on you.

Greeks like sweet and savory chard creations, too, according to Diane Kochilas, author of "The Glorious Foods of Greece" (Morrow). She describes a Lenten sweet pastry crescent made with olive oil and filled with chard, rice, walnuts, raisins, honey, cinnamon and cloves.