For the New England dish, see American chop suey. Chop suey is widely believed to have been invented in the U. 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 chop suey” and typical of popular foods.
One account claims that it was invented by Chinese American cooks working on the transcontinental railroad in the 19th century. 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 leftovers in a wok and served 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”, which he says “may justly be so-called the ‘national dish of China’. 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 the different meaning of cooked animal offal or entrails. Anderson, The Food of China, Yale University Press, 1990, ISBN 0300047398, p. Anderson, “Modern China: South” in K.
Chang, Food in Chinese Culture: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives, Yale, 1977. Conlin, Bacon, Beans and Galantines: Food and Foodways on the Western Mining Frontier, University of Nevada Press: Reno 1986, pp. Hsu, “From Chop Suey to Mandarin Cuisine: Fine Dining and the Refashioning of Chinese Ethnicity During the Cold War Era,” in Sucheng Chan, Madeline Yuan-yin Hsu, eds. 318, as quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, 1989. Louis Joseph Beck, New York’s Chinatown: An Historical Presentation of Its People and Places, p. Anderson, The Food of China, Yale University Press, 1988. Andrew Coe, Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States, 2009.
Alan Davidson, The Oxford Companion to Food, 1999. Monica Eng, “Chop Suey or Hooey? Chicago Tribune, January 4, 2006, online rpr. Charles Hayford, “Who’s Afraid of Chop Suey?
Cookbooks with recipes for chop suey and accounts of Chinese American cuisine Hom, Ken. Easy Family Recipes from a Chinese American Childhood. The Chinese Kitchen: Recipes, Techniques and Ingredients, History, and Memories from America’s Leading Authority on Chinese Cooking. A Classic Chinese-American Dish Takes On A Mexican Flair NPR. Chop Suey was invented, fact or fiction? Why do I have to complete a CAPTCHA? Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property.
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