Tourte de blettes: the sweet Swiss chard pie, what to order and what to avoid

Overview

On paper it sounds like a mistake: a dessert built on Swiss chard. A tourte de blettes is a covered pastry pie filled with the green leaves of chard, cut into strips,, bound with egg and sugar, studded with raisins and pine nuts, and seasoned with grated hard cheese. It is baked under a full pastry lid and usually finished with a dusting of powdered sugar. Cut open, the filling is a dense, dark green, faintly sweet and faintly savory, and it tastes far more of raisin and toasted nut than of vegetable.

The cheese is the part visitors double-take at, and it is correct. A little parmesan or a similar hard cheese such as sbrinz is in the standard recipes; it does not make the pie savory, it gives the sugar something to push against. Many recipes add thin slices of apple laid over the filling, and the raisins are often soaked first in rum or another spirit.

In the local language, Nissart, it is tourta de blea — blea being chard — and it is one of the few dishes that belongs to this city rather than to the coast in general. That is consistent with how the city’s kitchen was formed: Nice was ruled by the dukes of Savoy and their successors until 1860, and its cooking leans toward Liguria as much as toward the rest of France. Chard pies are common along that coast, mostly savory ones; the sweet version is the one Nice claims as its own.

You will often hear the sweet-with-cheese combination explained as a survival of medieval cooking, when sugar and cheese shared a plate without anyone finding it odd. It is a plausible and often-repeated explanation; treat it as one.

What to order

The words are simple. Une part de tourte de blettes gets you a slice; une tourte gets you the whole pie, which bakeries usually sell in a few sizes.

The one distinction worth knowing is sucrée versus salée. The sweet pie is the famous one, but a savory chard tourte also exists in the same kitchen — chard with egg, cheese, sometimes rice or onion, no sugar, no raisins. Both are legitimate. If a counter has two green pies side by side, ask which is sucrée; the sweet one is usually the one with the sugar-dusted lid.

What should arrive:

• pâte — a short, slightly crumbly crust, made with butter, olive oil or both, firm enough to hold a slice upright.
• blettes — the leaves only, cut into strips. The white ribs are used elsewhere in the kitchen and do not belong in this filling.
• raisins secs and pignons — raisins and pine nuts, both visible in the cut face, not dissolved into it.
• sucre glace on top — powdered sugar, dusted over a lid usually pricked with a fork.

It is usually eaten at room temperature, in the hand or with a fork, though some people like it warm. If you avoid alcohol, ask whether the raisins were soaked — the answer is often yes.

What to avoid

The failures of this dish are mostly visible in the cut face, so look at a slice before buying one.

A good filling looks like what it is: dark leaves, with raisins and pine nuts you can pick out. If you cannot find a single pine nut in the slice, the pie is missing one of its defining ingredients.

A wet, collapsing slice with a soggy base means the chard was not squeezed dry before mixing, and the pie will be heavy and grassy. The crust should break, not bend.

Be wary of the name drifting. Spinach sometimes stands in for chard. A label reading épinards is honest about it; a pie sold as blettes that tastes like spinach is not.

Practicalities

This is bakery food. The natural place to buy it is a bakery or pastry counter, where it sits beside the other local tarts, sold by the slice or whole; market stalls selling regional baking carry it too.

It fills two slots in the day. As dessert, a thin slice after a meal; or as the goûter, the mid-afternoon snack, with a coffee. Because it is usually eaten at room temperature and travels in paper, it is also good picnic food.

You will find the pie in every season, and it is also one of the thirteen Christmas desserts as Nice keeps them. On Sunday many smaller shops close, and some bakeries close early.