chop suey

Chop suey (Chinese zá suì, "mixed pieces") is an American-Chinese dish consisting of meats (often chicken, fish, beef, shrimp or pork), 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 addition of stir-fried noodles.

Chop suey is part of American Chinese cuisine, Canadian Chinese cuisine, and Indian Chinese cuisine.

Origin

Chop suey, made with garlic chicken and peapods, on rice.

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.

Chop suey is widely believed to have been invented in America by Chinese immigrants, but in fact comes from Taishan, a district of Guangdong Province which was the home of most of the early Chinese immigrants; the Hong Kong doctor Li Shu-fan reported that he knew it in Taishan in the 1890s.^[1]

Chop suey first appears in an American publication in 1898, described as "A Hash of Pork, with Celery, Onions, Bean Sprouts, etc."^[2]

Despite its Taishan background, there are various colorful stories about its origin, which Davidson (1999) characterizes as "culinary mythology": Some say it was invented by Chinese immigrant cooks working on the United States Transcontinental railway in the 19th century. Another story is that it was invented during Qing Dynasty premier Li Hongzhang's visit to the United States in 1896 by his chef, who tried to create a dish suitable for both Chinese and American palates:^[3] when reporters asked what food the premier was eating, his cook found it difficult to explain the dishes, and replied "mixed pieces";^[4] But this is also untrue.^[5]

In his book The Gangs of New York (1927), Herbert Asbury attributes the Americanized version of the term to a San Francisco dishwasher, calling it a bastardized version of the Cantonese phrase tsap sui, meaning "odds and ends", "miscellaneous pieces", or more simply "hash".

Outside of Taishan, the name "chop suey" or "shap sui in Cantonese,^[3] and "za sui", when used in Mandarin, has the somewhat different meaning 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 (Canton), I bought a pot for cooking za sui - so I'll savour your liver, entrails, and lungs." This may be the same as the "Chop Suey Kiang" found in 1898 New York.^[2]

During his exile in the United States, Liang Qichao, a Guangdong 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 did not eat.^[6] 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.

This dual meaning has meant that some Chinese restaurants in English-speaking countries label mixed entrails as "chop suey" on their English menus.

One of the last remaining vertical chop suey neon signs in the world is located in Los Angeles, California, at the Far East Chop Suey restaurant in Little Tokyo.

Varieties

Chop suey may be prepared in a variety of styles, such as chicken, beef, pork, king prawn, plain and special. Plain, or vegetable chop suey, is often one of the few traditional Chinese American take-out dishes offered without meat at many restaurants.

In American art and literature

Still specializing in traditional United States Chinese take out, This Chop Suey restaurant is located in Kingston, New York

• 1914: In Our Mr. Wrenn Nobel laureate Sinclair Lewis wrote: "Well, down at the Seven Flowery Kingdoms Chop Suey and American Cooking there's tea at five dollars a cup that they advertise is grown on 'cloud-covered mountain-tops."^[7]
• 1920: Babbitt Lewis wrote: "Paul returned four days later, and the Babbitts and Rieslings went festively to the movies and had chop suey at a Chinese restaurant."^[8]
• 1922: Main Street contains the line "None of them save that city-rounder Harry Haydock had heard of any Chinese dish except chop sooey."
• The words "chop suey" are part of a college cheer in the 1925 Harold Lloyd film The Freshman. His father is on his shortwave radio at the same time and hearing this, yells "I've picked up China!"
• 1926: Louis Armstrong records his composition Cornet Chop Suey with his Hot Five.
• 1929 Edward Hopper paints "Chop Suey" [1] (which features part of a restaurant sign almost identical to the one in the photo at right). Shortly thereafter, sometime between 1929 and 1931, Mark Rothko's Composition I [recto) closely and intentionally paraphrased Hopper's painting.
• Mystery writer Raymond Chandler wrote in Farewell My Lovely the famous line "I was having some Chinese food when a dark shadow fell over my chop suey."^{[citation needed]}

See also

• Chinatowns in North America
• Chow mein

References

• E.N. Anderson, The Food of China, Yale University Press, 1988.
• Alan Davidson, The Oxford Companion to Food, 1999.
• Monica Eng, "Chop Suey or Hooey?" Orig Chicago Tribune, January 4, 2006, online rpr. Honolulu Advertiser, [2]

Notes

External links

• Snopes: Urban Legends Reference Pages: Chop Suey
• "Chop Suey was invented, fact or fiction?"
• Chinese-American Museum of Chicago