Peppery Cabbage

Cabbage is such a familiar vegetable to Westerners that I am often asked by my students if it really exists in China. It does indeed. In Canton, where I grew up, there were miles and miles of it in the fields, and we ate it in soup and stir-fried because it was so sweet. It was in America that I learned that cabbage could be turned into something called coleslaw. What I have done is to use the flavors of western China, of Hunan and Szechuan, to create a hot, spicy coleslawlike dish.