![]() ![]() Guests at the party, he wrote, dressed in the “loose garb of the heathen Chinese” and the menu included “bird’s nest soup, rice a la Chinese, chop suey and other heathenish-sounding dishes”. The reporter’s scorn for the Chinese was still evident. … a moist mixture of chicken, lentils, and spices, with a flavoring of onions, and is eaten with a gravy of the drawn blood of chicken, flavored with a peculiar Chinese decoction.īy 1909, chop suey was served as part of a novelty dinner given by a society figure in Melbourne. The article, which is painfully racist and patronising about Chinese people, describes the dish as: In 1900, an article in the Ballarat Star referred to the “Chinese cookery fad” in America, and described chop suey as a “supreme favourite” with English speaking restaurant-goers. ![]() While this is not true, it’s fairly certain that the dish made its way to Australia via the US. She contends that the name, rather than meaning “odds and ends” or even “garbage” is actually derived from the Toisanese tsaap slui (雜碎), a set phrase that refers specifically to entrails and giblets, and that it had noble origins in China as early as the late 18th century.Ī prevailing myth, both in America and Australia, is that chop suey isn’t Chinese at all but was invented in the USA as a cheap way to feed Chinese and non-Chinese miners on the goldfields. Brown challenges the popular legends about a dish which, she acknowledges, has become degraded over time, in America as much as it has in Australia. The dish was described as “a very palatable stew made of bean sprouts, chicken’s gizzards and livers, calves’ trip, chagon fish dried, pork and a number of other ingredients”.Īccording to Miranda Brown, writing for Atlas Obscura, at that time chop suey was considered a fine dish, worth of a place at the most lavish banquets. ![]() As well as explaining the intricacies of chopsticks and waxing lyrical about the perfection of Chinese rice, the column talked about “Chow Chop suey” (or, in what was obviously a typographer’s error, “Chowchopsney”). When prepared by cooks who understand the essence of stir-frying - high heat, short cooking time and just enough thick sticky brownish sauce to coat the ingredients - chop suey can be a truly delicious dish.In 1887, a columnwidely syndicated in Australian newspapers introduced readers to the joys of a Chinese restaurant in New York. Today, chop suey is cooked in pretty much the same way that most meat and vegetable stir fries are. It was so bad that the Chinese in America did not eat it.īut all that was long ago. American-style chop suey, in its earliest form, bore little resemblance to anything found in China. The immigrants who introduced the stir fry to America were not skilled cooks, and their attempt to replicate the dish from home was more Frankenstein-like than anything else. The difference between the source and the adaptation is in the cooking. While the term chop suey itself, spelled that way, may be an American thing, there are anthropological bases that the Chinese-American chop suey is most probably an adaption of the Chinese tsap seui (literally, “miscellaneous leftovers”), a dish found in Guandong where many of the early Chinese immigrants to the United States came from. Just think of fried rice and you get the idea. The story, in either version, sounds plausible enough especially when we consider how good the Chinese are at salvaging leftovers because being wasteful is frowned upon in Asia. American miners demanded food, the flustered Chinese cook didn’t have much to cook with so he got creative. He tossed them together, added sauce, and chop suey was born.Ī variation of the story pins the birth of chop suey during the Gold Rush. You might have read the story that, during the construction of the First Transcontinental Railroad when the Chinese flocked to the United States to seek work, American laborers wanted food but there was this Chinese cook had only bits and pieces of meat and vegetables. If that’s not confusing enough, I would learn much later that the American tale might be more myth than fact. Then I read that the dish was born in America. Along with sweet sour pork, I grew up thinking that chop suey was the quintessential Chinese food. ![]()
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