Chop suey

For the New England dish, see American chop suey. For other uses, see Chop suey (disambiguation).

Chop suey
Traditional Chinese	雜碎
Simplified Chinese	杂碎
Hanyu Pinyin	zá suì
Jyutping	zaap6 seoi3
Literal meaning	(probably) odds and ends assorted pieces/mixed and broken
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin zá suì Yue: Cantonese Yale Romanization jaahp seui Jyutping zaap6 seoi3

Chop suey (usually pronounced /ˈtʃɒpˈsuːi/) is a dish from American Chinese cuisine and other forms of overseas Chinese cuisine, generally consisting of meat (usually chicken, pork, beef, shrimp or fish) and eggs, cooked quickly with vegetables such as bean sprouts, cabbage, and celery, and bound in a starch-thickened sauce. It is typically served with rice, but can become the Chinese-American form of chow mein with the substitution of stir-fried noodles for rice.

Chop suey has become a prominent part of American Chinese cuisine, British Chinese cuisine, Filipino cuisine, Canadian Chinese cuisine, German Chinese cuisine, Indian Chinese cuisine, and Polynesian cuisine. In Chinese Indonesian cuisine/Dutch Chinese Indonesian cuisine it is known as cap cai (tjap tjoi) (雜菜, "mixed vegetables") and mainly consists of vegetables.

Origins

Chop suey is widely believed to have been developed in the U.S. by Chinese Americans. However, the anthropologist E. N. Anderson traces the dish to tsap seui (杂碎, "miscellaneous leftovers"), common in Taishan, Guangdong (Toisan) – the home of many early Chinese immigrants to the United States. Hong Kong doctor Li Shu-fan likewise reported that he knew it in Toisan in the 1890s.

The long list of conflicting stories about the origin of chop suey is, in the words of food historian Alan Davidson, "a prime example of culinary mythology" and typical of popular foods.

Filipino chop suey, introduced during the American colonial period of the Philippines

One account claims that it was invented by Chinese American cooks working on the transcontinental railroad in the 19th century. Another tale is that it was created during Qing Dynasty premier Li Hongzhang's visit to the United States in 1896 by his chef, who tried to create a meal suitable for both Chinese and American palates. Another story is that Li wandered to a local Chinese restaurant after the hotel kitchen had closed, where the chef, embarrassed that he had nothing ready to offer, came up with the new dish using scraps of leftovers. Yet recent research by the scholar Renqui Yu led him to conclude that "no evidence can be found in available historical records to support the story that Li Hung Chang [Li Hongzhang] ate chop suey in the United States." Li brought three Chinese chefs with him, and would not have needed to eat in local restaurants or invent new dishes in any case. Yu speculates that shrewd Chinese American restaurant owners took advantage of the publicity surrounding his visit to promote chop suey as Li's favorite.

Looking north on Grant Avenue in Chinatown, San Francisco (1952)

Far East Chop Suey restaurant in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles

Restaurants like this are now rare, but were once a common sight in the United States. Coincidentally, both restaurants are now named Far East Café.

Another myth is that, in the 1860s, a Chinese restaurant cook in San Francisco was forced to serve something to drunken miners after hours, when he had no fresh food. To avoid a beating, the cook threw leftover meat and vegetables into a wok and served it to the miners, who loved it and asked what dish it was—he replied "chopped sui". There is no good evidence for any of these stories.

Chop suey appears in an 1884 article in the Brooklyn Eagle, by Wong Chin Foo, "Chinese Cooking", in which he says it "may justly be so-called the 'national dish of China'." In 1888 Wong wrote that a "staple dish for the Chinese gourmand is chow chop svey [sic], a mixture of chickens' livers and gizzards, fungi, bamboo buds, pigs' tripe, and bean sprouts stewed with spices." An 1896 newspaper report states: "Chow chop suey is a sort of stew made of chicken's livers and gizzards, calves' tripe, bean sprouts, celery and 'meu', which is a sort of Chinese first cousin to macaroni". An article in The Illustrated American on Chinese cuisine in 1897, reproduces a menu from Ma Hung Low's restaurant on Mott Street in New York's Chinatown quarter which includes the dish "Beef Chop Suey with Bean Sprouts, Water Chestnuts and Boiled Rice." The dish itself, referred to as "the standard Chinese dish of chop suey," is described as "a stew of beef, chicken, or pork, with bean sprouts, mushrooms, water-lily roots, sprouted grain and unknown flavorings." In 1898, it is described as "A Hash of Pork, with Celery, Onions, Bean Sprouts, etc."

During his travels in the United States, Liang Qichao, a Guangdong (Canton) native, wrote in 1903 that there existed in the United States a food item called chop suey which was popularly served by Chinese restaurateurs, but which local Chinese people do not eat, because the cooking technique is "really awful".

In earlier periods of Chinese history, chop suey or chap sui in Cantonese, and za sui, in Mandarin, has different meanings of cooked animal offal or entrails. For example, in the classic novel Journey to the West (circa 1590), Sun Wukong tells a lion-monster in chapter 75: "When I passed through Guangzhou, I bought a pot for cooking za sui – so I'll savor your liver, entrails, and lungs." The term za sui (杂碎) is found in newer Chinese-English dictionaries with both meanings listed: cooked entrails, and chop suey in the Western sense.

See also

• American chop suey
• Chinatowns in the United States
• Cap cai
• Chop Suey! (song)
• Chop suey font
• Japchae
• Subgum

Further reading

• E. N. Anderson, The Food of China, Yale University Press, 1988.
• Chen, Yong (2014). Chop Suey, USA: The Story of Chinese Food in America. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 9780231168922.
• Barbas, Samantha (2003). "'I'll Take Chop Suey': Restaurants as Agents of Culinary and Cultural Change". Journal of Popular Culture. 36 (4): 669–686. doi:10.1111/1540-5931.00040.
• Andrew Coe, Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States, 2009. ISBN 0-19-533107-9.
• Alan Davidson, The Oxford Companion to Food, 1999.
• Monica Eng, "Chop Suey or Hooey?", orig. Chicago Tribune, January 4, 2006, online rpr. Honolulu Advertiser, [1]: in the Tribune: Eng, Monica (2005-11-03). "The rise and fall of chop suey". Chicago Tribune.
• Hayford, Charles (2010), "Who's Afraid of Chop Suey?", Education About Asia, 16 (3), Association for Asian Studies: 7–12. Free online, also archived at Wayback Machine
• Liu, Haiming (2009-02-16). "Chop Suey as Imagined Authentic Chinese Food: The Culinary Identity of Chinese Restaurants in the United States" (PDF). Journal of Transnational American Studies. 1 (1). doi:10.5070/T811006946. ISSN 1940-0764.
• Crow, Carl (September 1937). "Sharks' fins and ancient eggs". Harper's. Retrieved 23 March 2018.(subscription required)
• "Chop suey fad grows in popularity". Saint Paul Globe. Saint Paul, Minnesota. 1902-07-26. p. 29. - Clipping from Newspapers.com.

Cookbooks with recipes for chop suey and accounts of Chinese American cuisine

• Hom, Ken. Easy Family Recipes from a Chinese American Childhood. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.
• Yin-Fei Lo, Eileen. The Chinese Kitchen: Recipes, Techniques and Ingredients, History, and Memories from America's Leading Authority on Chinese Cooking. New York: William Morrow, 1999.
• Chatterjee, Rhitu. A Classic Chinese-American Dish Takes On A Mexican Flair NPR. August 3, 2017.

External links

• Chop Suey Origin at Snopes
• Chop Suey was invented, fact or fiction? August 29, 1896 at americaslibrary.gov