Silq û Hêk: Kurdish Chard and Eggs
Some Kurdish dishes are festival showpieces; this one is a Tuesday morning. Chard — known across the region as silq — is a common green in Kurdistan, and one of the homeliest, most loved ways to cook it is the simplest: wilted down soft, often with long-cooked sweet onion and a little spice, then crowned with eggs, poached or fried, and eaten with warm flatbread. It is a quiet, green, nourishing plate, the kind of brunch a Kurdish household throws together from what is in the garden and the egg basket. Eggs cooked with greens are not unique to the Kurds — cooks across the wider region pair eggs with spinach, chard, and herbs, and this series will not pretend otherwise. What makes this version worth its own entry is not novelty but memory. One of its best-known champions is the Kurdish chef Pary Baban, who fled Kurdistan during the Saddam Hussein years and kept a diary of the recipes closest to her heart while she was displaced; today she cooks them at her Kurdish restaurant in London. Her chard and eggs — scattered with seeds, garlic, and even rose petals, served with flatbread — is exactly the sort of dish that survives exile: humble enough to carry in the memory, precise enough to taste of home. This is the one-hundred-and-third article in the series, and the first to centre on eggs. It is a small, green reminder that a cuisine is not only its banquet dishes; it is also the everyday plate a displaced cook writes down so as not to forget it.
Key Takeaways
• Chard (silq) is a common Kurdish green; cooked down and topped with eggs it makes a beloved brunch
• Wilted chard, often with caramelised onion and spice, is crowned with poached or fried eggs
• Served with warm flatbread, often finished with seeds, garlic, and rose petals
• A homely everyday dish — and, for displaced Kurds, a taste of home carried into exile
Quick Facts
Kurdish Name: Silq (chard) with hêk (eggs) — a chard-and-egg brunch dish
Type: Everyday breakfast / brunch dish
Core: Wilted chard (often with onion and spice) topped with poached or fried eggs
Served with: Warm flatbread; finished with seeds, garlic, and sometimes rose petals
How It Is Made
The method is forgiving and quick, which is part of its charm. Chard is washed and the leaves and stalks chopped; the stalks, which take longer, are softened first, often in plenty of olive oil and butter with an onion cooked slowly until sweet and golden. Warm spices go in — cumin, perhaps chilli or a little turmeric — and the leaves are wilted down until tender and glossy. Then the eggs: either poached separately and laid on top, or cracked straight into wells made in the greens and covered until the whites set and the yolks stay soft. The finishing is where a cook signs their name. A scatter of toasted seeds for crunch, a hit of garlic — fried in butter, rubbed through, or sprinkled as granules — and, in some kitchens, a few dried rose petals for fragrance and colour, the same rose note that runs through Kurdish sweets. It comes to the table with warm flatbread for scooping, and that is the whole meal: green, golden, and unfussy. Spinach or foraged spring greens can stand in for the chard, which is exactly how a dish like this survives — by bending to whatever the season and the garden provide.
The Recipe in the Diary
It would be easy to pass over a plate of chard and eggs. This series pauses on it because of how such dishes travel. The chef Pary Baban left Kurdistan during the Saddam Hussein era, displaced from her home, and during those years she kept a diary — not of events, but of recipes, the dishes she did not want to lose. She now cooks from that diary at a Kurdish restaurant in London, and her chard and eggs is one of them. That is a story this series has told in many forms: terxena packed in a diaspora suitcase, kadeh carried from Zakho to Jerusalem, şamburek queued for in a far-off city. But those are special-occasion foods, the obvious things to miss. What Baban’s diary captures is subtler and, in a way, more moving — that the things an exile most needs to write down are often the plainest: how your mother cooked the chard, how many eggs, where the rose petals went. A people can be pushed out of its land, but a green pan of silq topped with soft eggs is small enough to carry in the head and exact enough to rebuild a kitchen around. The everyday dish, it turns out, is not the disposable one. It is the one that says, most quietly and most stubbornly, that home still exists.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is silq?
Silq is the regional name for chard (Swiss chard / leaf beet), a common leafy green in Kurdistan. Both its leaves and stalks are eaten. In this dish the chard is cooked down soft, usually with onion and spices, and served with eggs. Spinach or foraged spring greens are often used the same way when chard is not on hand.
Is chard and eggs a uniquely Kurdish dish?
No — cooking eggs with greens is common across the wider region, and this series does not claim it for the Kurds alone. What gives the Kurdish version its identity is the everyday role chard plays in Kurdish kitchens, the particular finishing touches (garlic, seeds, sometimes rose petals), the flatbread it is eaten with, and its place in Kurdish home and memory — including in the recipe diaries of displaced Kurdish cooks.
What is it served with?
Warm flatbread is the essential partner, used to scoop up the greens and egg. The dish is often finished with toasted seeds, garlic, and sometimes dried rose petals. Like much of Kurdish breakfast — flatbread, cheese, honey, and yogurt — it is rounded off with a glass of hot, sweet black tea.
Conclusion
Silq û hêk is the one-hundred-and-third article in this series, and a deliberate change of register after the cauldrons and feasts. Chard and eggs is not a dish anyone fights over the origins of; it is a plate of soft greens and runny yolks eaten on an ordinary morning with bread and tea. But its very ordinariness is the point. When a Kurdish chef forced out of her homeland sat down to write the recipes she could not bear to lose, this is the kind of thing she wrote down — not only the wedding dishes, but the green pan from a weekday kitchen. One hundred and three articles in, silq û hêk stands for the humblest and most durable layer of a cuisine: the everyday food that, precisely because it is everyday, becomes the truest measure of home.
References and Further Reading
delicious. magazine — Kurdish poached eggs with Swiss chard, by chef Pary Baban of Nandine
Kurdish cuisine — overview of Kurdish greens, dairy, and the bread-cheese-honey-tea breakfast
Kurdish-History.com — Gulav: the Kurdish rose note that sometimes finishes this dish
Kurdish-History.com — Çay: the glass of tea that completes a Kurdish breakfast