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seasonings and accurate cooking times and they are never served as a hasty afterthought, chopped roughly or boiled to death.
    If you were a child of the sixties as I was, you might well have been brought up on vegetables cooked in a pan of salted water, boiled until soft, if not reduced to a total pulp. Prepared in this way vegetables never stand a chance of playing anything other than a poor supporting role. Recently the West has rediscovered vegetables. In the UK, the ‘five a day’ campaign has taken hold and of course vegetables feature heavily in weight-loss plans,whether cabbage soup, low GI and GL, or just good old calorie restriction. One reaction to the problems that have resulted from an increasingly limited diet in the West is for a number of gurus to recommend ‘super’ or ‘bonus’ foods. Next time you pick up one of the excellent books on nutrition now on offer, take a look to see if it has a list of foods with protective properties or exceptional nutritional value. They always make me smile, since nearly all the foods they recommend are daily fare in China.
    Vegetables, as we now know, are the ‘good guys’, packed full of the vitamins,minerals and active constituents that were previously overlooked in the macronutrient approach of Western experts which emphasized protein, carbohydrate and fat and played lip service to vitamins. A portion of frozen peas, a glass of orange juice, a handful of vacuum-packed salad leaves all help us notch up that ‘five a day‘ total. Food manufacturers have relabelled all their products to draw attention to the number of vegetable portions they contain and are busy launching new nutrient-packed vegetable substitutes too. We are making a tremendous effort to get vegetables back on the stage; but in China they have always been in the limelight.
    In China the ‘bonus foods’ of the new ‘healthy’ Western diet are not taken as supplements, or served as token seasonings or side dishes. Onions are stir-fried with lamb, not lamb with onions; celery is served with strips of beef, not beef with celery. Green chillies are shredded and mixed with coriander and cucumber in the aptly named laohu cai (‘tiger dish’); sometimes chillies are just stir-fried with more chillies. Ginger and garlic are thrown into recipes by the fistful; there are 101 recipes for cabbage and aubergine.
    The difference between the quantities of vegetables bought, used in cooking and eaten in China and the West is difficult to visualize. The first time I saw root ginger stacked up on a hessian mat at the side of the street I assumed it was Jerusalem artichoke: I had never seen more than a couple of pieces in Western supermarkets and here it was piled waist high. Soy beans and mung beans were another source of amazement: a small market would sell a two-foot mountain in one day, more, I reckoned, than the weekly turnover of my local supermarket in the UK.
    When the stallholders in the Chinese markets noticed a ‘foreigner’ they would excitedly hold out tomatoes, lettuce, potatoes, carrots and, on a good day, broccoli. Dismissive of these imports, but more influenced than I realized by nights at the Golden Panda back home, initially I would search for baby corn (not sold in northern China), water chestnuts and bamboo shoots (both seasonal and unrecognizable anyway in their unpeeled state); but gradually I simply learned to choose what looked good and fresh.
    How to transform the cai in the market into the deliciously presented cai on Chinese tables was not something I learned overnight. On the contrary, I spent many an hour pondering this problem – when I should have been doing my Chinese homework.
    Culinary barriers are always difficult to penetrate. I knew that to discover the secrets of the Chinese diet I needed to learn to cook. This is a difficult concept to communicate, especially to someone to whom the art is obvious. My first efforts to tap Xiao Ding’s store of knowledge were disastrous.