Shopping for vegetables by the book

Buying ingredients for cooking a Chinese meal used to be a challenge when I lived in the United Kingdom, but now I'm overwhelmed by choice.

Items that are widely available in Beijing could be difficult to track down, and finding some often involved a good deal of searching.

I once spent months trying to buy cassia bark, something that is common here but can be hard to find at home, where its close relative cinnamon is preferred.

Wherever I went, I would call in at food shops in the hope of finding the elusive spice, but without success.

Finally I spotted a bag of cassia bark lurking at the back of a shelf in a store while visiting friends in a seaside town, and my quest was over.

Fresh Chinese vegetables were available, but making a recipe that required specialist ingredients such as lotus root would require a trip to one of a number of Chinese supermarkets clustered together in the center of London.

I would return home clutching a battered, unprepossessing specimen that had lost much of its crispness during the long journey from Asia.

All this changed when I moved to Beijing.

As I explored the city's fruit and vegetable markets I found I could obtain almost any ingredient I wanted.

If anything, there was too much available, and I puzzled over what many items were.

What do you do with the yams, the gourds, the shoots, the roots, all those different types of fungi, all those leaves ...

Fortunately I found a book called A Cook's Guide to Chinese Vegetables by Martha Dahlen that I recommend to anyone who is similarly baffled by the wide range of items on the vegetable stalls.

The book has illustrations to help you identify the many different types of produce, gives romanized names and advice on how to make sure whatever you buy is fresh, and even includes Western and Chinese recipes so you know what to do once you get your shopping home.

For example, Chinese box thorn, or gou qi cai, should have a "bushy green look of healthy vigor" and can be used with pork liver to make soup.

Many of the ingredients have colorful names such as night-fragrant flower, fuzzy melon, sponge luffa and white wormwood.

I learned that those brown lengths of root up to a meter long are burdock and can be stir-fried, braised or boiled.

Dahlen advises shoppers to "check the surface for any signs of rot or mold".

There's one thing that no book can help you with, however.

When it comes to haggling over the price of your Chinese greens and lotus root, you're on your own.