Vinegar is one of the staples in the Chinese kitchen, together with oil, rice, salt and soy sauce. Without it, the home chef would lose about a third of her repertoire of recipes.

In the South, we add vinegar to sauces and soups, and use it to pickle a wide variety of vegetables. In the North, it is used as a dressing or dip that is almost always on the dining table, and everything from thinly sliced, braised beef shin to smoked chicken to smashed cucumbers are dunked into vinegar.

Where noodles are the staple instead of rice, vinegar is also indispensable. It takes away the aftertaste of the alkali used to preserve noodles, and it balances the salt of the sauces.

And of course, no platter of dumplings, boiled or fried, can do without its accompanying dips of vinegar with ginger, garlic or chili.

The matured vinegar from Shanxi is a fragrant dip. Its dense aroma cuts through the richness of the fatty meat used in the dumplings, and it also adds a sharpness to the otherwise bland dumpling skin.

Here's a recipe for making pot stickers or fried dumplings, useful after you buy your first tub of Shanxi vinegar. Remember to get the eight-year-old vinegar, it has a very addictive flavor and bouquet.

You can contact the writer at paulined@chinadaily.com.cn.