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One day I braved the market and bought some ingredients that I considered ‘Chinese’: beansprouts, mange-tout and some very watery pink-looking prawns. She was not impressed. Dismissive of the prawns, she simply took the beansprouts and fried them with Sichuan peppercorns, minced ginger and spring onion, and some fresh red chilli, and then tossed in some chopped coriander. A splash of vinegar on the beansprouts keeps them crisp. Soy sauce, she explained, should be avoided as it makes them brown and soggy: a pinch of salt is used instead. No cook worth his salt – or even his soy sauce –would want to detract from the beansprout’s greatest attribute, its crispness. After she had washed and dried the wok she chucked in the mange-tout and fried it with a generous handful of garlic and a good pinch of salt. I could not believe that such a delicious dish was so simple to prepare.
    I soon discovered that Xiao Ding could make a dish out of any leaf, shoot, root or tuber that I chose to bring home, but that she generally liked to take one ingredient at a time and choose a method and seasoning that cooked it to perfection. Sometimes two ingredients that complement or contrast each other are put into the same dish, but they are usually cooked separately and mixed at the last moment. Thin shreds of meat or tender morsels of fried egg are often used in dishes where vegetables take the leading role. The strips are made tender by coating them with cornflour and treating them with a drop of cooking wine. Or beaten eggs are added to hot oil in the wok, then stirred with chopsticks to break them into pieces as they puff up.
    A new look at familiar vegetables
    Working with Xiao Ding and eating in local Beijing restaurants completely transformed my attitude towards even the most mundane of vegetables.
Cabbage
    Take cabbage, which was the bane of my school dinners as a child, but which is something of a national obsession in China. At one time, in northern China, the large Beijing cabbage, known as da bai cai (‘big cabbage’), which is usually sold abroad as ‘Chinese leaves’, was practically the only leafy vegetable available. Fortunately this humble vegetable is bursting with vitamins and the anti-oxidants which are now being shown to fight the damaging effects of free radicals, so it was able to provide even the poorest country-dwellers with a substantial supply of nutrients.
    In 2001, the average Beijing resident consumed 77 pounds of cabbage. 4 As a comparison, the highest ever consumption of cabbage in the US was in the 1920s (22 pounds per capita); the 2003 estimate was 7. 5 pounds. 5 When I was first in Beijing the government still handed out free supplies of cabbage in urban areas, organizing blue ‘Liberation’ trucks to rumble in from the countryside so that people could fill their courtyards and balconies with enough to see them through the winter. In 1989 the supply outstripped demand and the government urged people to eat up the stocks, earning Beijing’s favourite vegetable the name of ‘patriotic cabbage’. The outsides sometimes got frostbitten, but the tight-packed leaves inside remained crisp and fresh for months. Young,comparatively affluent people like my teacher Hong Yun were slightly embarrassed by this state generosity, seeing the cabbage as a reminder of an unhappy past, but I saw how many old folk and families were grateful for the gift. And there is no doubt that most Chinese people like cabbage – as would most people if they knew how best to cook it.
    The Chinese name bai cai means ‘white vegetable’, and the ubiquitous da bai cai (big cabbage) is light in colour. But Chinese chefs can also choose from xiao bai cai (small cabbage), yuan bai cai (round cabbage), Shanghai bai cai (Shanghai cabbage), naiyou bai cai (milk cabbage) and ta cai (rosette cabbage). And there are a host of other greens: you cai (rape vegetable), the amusingly named jimao cai (chicken feather vegetable), tong hao and haozi