Twice-Cooked Swiss Chard

Chard, known in Chinese as ‘ox leather greens’ or ‘thick-skinned greens’ because of its leathery appearance, is a humble peasant vegetable, so humble in fact that it is traditionally referred to as ‘pig fodder’. In the not-so-distant past, only the desperate would eat it; in Sichuan, at times when meat was hard to come by, it was used as a substitute for pork in that much-loved traditional dish, Twice-cooked Pork. Nowadays, with the vogue for rustic food,