Most everyone has a culinary dish or two passed down from generation to generation; most of the time there are no recipes for these dishes. People learned to make them by watching their parents and grandparents who learned to make them by watching their parents and grandparents. One dish my mother and her siblings grew up eating was Chop Suey. My grandmother made it occasionally without a recipe adding some of this and some of that until she got it where she wanted it. Sometimes it was a little sweeter than others but the basics were the same: soy sauce, beef, Chinese vegetables, water chestnuts, brown sugar and a generous pile of crunchy chow mein noodles on top. Fortunately my mom had the forethought to watch my grandmother cook her Chop Suey and write down everything she did one day before she passed away sixteen years ago. A couple of weeks ago my mom made Chop Suey for a birthday dinner for my aunt.
On the day of the dinner, I started thinking about Chop Suey and wondered how my grandmother came to make it. Chinese food wasn’t as common as it is now; it was just within the past few years in my life I was able to find Chinese food recipes other than the common fried rice. She didn’t have any friends of Chinese or Asian descent that I knew about. I asked my mom and aunt if they knew how she got the recipe and why she started to cook Chop Suey but they didn’t know. So I got on-line and did some research. Apparently I’m not the first to be intrigued by this dish because I found an informative article published in the Journal of Transnational American Studies just last year on 2/18/2009 by author, Haiming Liu, at http://escholarship.org/uc/item/2bc4k55r.
Liu’s article traces the history of Chop Suey in America. He stated most Chinese restaurants in America from the turn of the 20th century until the 1960s were named Chop Suey House. During that time, people equated Chop Suey with Chinese Food. As with a lot of ethnic food in this country, Chop Suey as it was made here was not the same as it was in China if even there was such a dish in China which seems to be debated pursuant to what I could find on the subject on the web. This doesn’t surprise me as I learned long ago fortune cookies were invented here, not in China.
According to Liu’s article, Chop Suey had no standard recipe. A reference to a dish called Chow Chop Suey in 1888 translated into “to stir fry animal intestines”. Chop Suey was a homemade “humble” dish made from extra livestock parts among other ingredients which explains the lack of a standard recipe. In the ensuing decades, Chop Suey transformed substituting more ingredients more palatable to Americans like pork or chicken, became more popular and the namesake of restaurants which began to spring up throughout the country. Americans thought they were consuming an authentic ethnic dish when in reality they were eating something America essentially invented. Chop Suey as they were enjoying didn’t exist in China and in fact America’s Chop Suey was “introduced” to China in the 1940s. Surely the U.S. Army thought it was doing something special when it served Chop Suey to our troops as an “ethnic” dish in that time period as well. Chop Suey recipes were printed in newspapers from the 1910s to the 1950s. So this is how I imagine the dish’s birth in my family:
It was a random Tuesday in the late 1940s or early 1950s. It was late February; the winter was getting old, it was wearing on my grandparents and my young aunts and uncles who were running amuck through the house infected with cabin fever. My grandmother was tired of cooking meatloaf and was in the mood for something different. After packing my grandfather’s lunch, she sat down with a cup of lukewarm coffee to read the paper. In the home section, she saw a recipe for Chop Suey. She’d heard of Chop Suey, drove by the couple of Chop Suey houses in town but never stopped because she was afraid she wouldn’t like it and didn’t have the funds to waste on such a luxury. She saw the recipe called for beef, soy sauce and brown sugar; items she had on hand. It didn’t sound too bad so she thought she’d make it for dinner that night. She went to the local grocer’s or maybe ethnic food store to purchase the Chinese vegetables needed. She followed the recipe in the newspaper for the most part leaving out those ingredients she knew she or her family did not find appetizing. My grandpa was disappointed to not see his usual meat and potatoes upon returning from work but his relatively new bride seemed pleased with herself so he didn’t want to hurt her feelings. The kids ate it, picking out the vegetables. As the children grew they began to request the dish, enjoying it more and those who didn’t simply skimmed the sweet beefy gravy off the top to eat with the chow mein noodles. Perhaps my grandma used the recipe an additional time or two but after that, maybe she lost it but found she didn’t need it any longer. So she went on making the Chop Suey from memory occasionally throughout the rest of her life. Then one day in her late 50s her daughter asked to observe the Chop Suey making process; the daughter now holds that legacy to share and pass on to her children and grandchildren.
The history of food intrigues me; I remember my mom and aunt talking about the first time they had tacos. I believe my aunt bought the ingredients and announced they were “going to try something different called tacos”. Now, tacos are common with numerous other Mexican dishes and salsa is bigger than ketchup in the condiment race. The foods invented in my lifetime to this point have got to be those cooked by microwave. Who knows what foods will surface in this century – maybe something cooked with solar energy or something where you just push a button to heat without a stove or microwave like those coffee drink and soup products I’ve seen occasionally. Whatever it is, it is likely to add to my bottom line. Or maybe it will be a candy bar with the calories and nutrition of broccoli—now THAT is something I could eat up!!!
(To read the article referenced in this post, got to http://escholarship.org/uc/item/2bc4k55r. All historical facts came from the article written by Hiaming Liu entitled Chop Suey as Imagined Authentic Chinese Food: The Culinary Identity of Chinese Restaurants in the United States, published in the Journal of Transnational American Studies, 1(1) on 2/18/2009.)
