Ingredients · Other
Napa Cabbage
Brassica rapa subsp. pekinensis · Brassicaceae (cabbage family)
What it’s like, and how to use it
How to use it
In this shop it arrives already roasted and dried, in a blend. Fresh, it is the cabbage for kimchi, hot pot and stir-fries, and it cooks far faster than a European cabbage.
With food
Chile and garlic. Ginger. Pork and beef. Fish sauce. Sesame. Rice. Peanut.
With spices
Gochugaru. Ginger and garlic. Sesame. Black pepper. Long pepper, as in the blend it sits in.
With tea
Not a tea ingredient.
Its story
Where it comes from
The first records of napa cabbage cultivation date to the fifteenth century in the Yangtze River region of China, and it spread from there to Korea and Japan, then to the rest of the world from the nineteenth century with the Chinese diaspora. Our lot names no origin.
What happened
The name is a borrowing of a borrowing. Napa comes from colloquial and regional Japanese, where nappa means the leaves of any vegetable used as food — so napa cabbage says, roughly, leaf cabbage. Its Japanese name hakusai and the Mandarin baicai both mean white vegetable. Its most consequential role anywhere is in Korea: it is the main ingredient of baechu-kimchi, the most common kind of kimchi — though it only reached Korea at the end of the nineteenth century, which means the kimchi everyone pictures is younger than it looks.
