Stuffed Chard

This fashionable leafy vegetable was much loved by the Ottomans. In the garden it has all the virtues: beautiful to look at, with its thick, flat white (or red or yellow) stem and shiny green leaves, and more forgiving than spinach, which tends to bolt. Chard gives you two vegetables in one – the stems can be cooked like celery, the leaves like spinach; and it tastes good, too.

The Ottomans and their successors were and are very fond of things stuffed – dolma. Dolmabache, the