According to Roger Horowitz, author of Putting Meat on the America Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation, the missing offal was a casualty of a broader change in the way that meat was distributed in the United States. The organ meats-previously the stew’s chief attraction-had begun to disappear from chop suey. But cookbooks containing chop suey recipes published a few years later offer clues. Liang never said what exactly irked him about the dish. “As for what they call ‘chop suey,’” he fumed, “the cooking skills involved are so subpar that no one in China would ever eat it.” Liang was underwhelmed with the quality of the Americanized rendition, to put it lightly. When statesman and revolutionary Liang Qichao visited New York City in 1903, he was shocked to find hundreds of eateries catering to what he called the American “addiction” to this one dish. Chinese immigrants realized they could make a living selling chop suey and other Southern Chinese fare not just to America’s rich and powerful, but also to the working class. Chop suey adorned tables at Chicago’s exclusive Victoria Hotel, while American socialites served the dish at parties in their upscale private residences. Chefs prepared it for high-brow club meetings, plays, and formal balls.

King called the “Chinese epicurean sensibility” to the American ruling class. This writer also extolled “a toothsome stew composed of bean sprouts, chicken’s gizzards and livers, calf’s tripe, dragon fish, dried and imported from China, pork, chicken and various other ingredients which I was unable to make out.” That was chop suey.Īt the start of the 20th century, this stew came to exemplify what historian Samuel C. In 1886, journalist Allan Forman recalled a splendid meal taken in New York’s Mong Sing Wah, a place he called a “Celestial Delmonico’s”-a label that compared the Chinese restaurant favorably to the era’s leading fine-dining establishment. What’s inside a can of La Choy Vegetable Chop Suey? Bean sprouts, celery, water, salt, water chestnuts, onion, carrots, bamboo shoots, sugar, red bell peppers, monosodium glutamate, dehydrated garlic, ascorbic acid (“to protect color”), citric acid, and “flavor.” Amanda Perez for Gastro Obscuraīut chop suey arrived in the United States in the mid-19th century to much acclaim. Then pour in soy sauce and voilà, you have a quick weeknight meal composed of soggy bean sprouts, soft water chestnuts, and faded pink bell peppers. To prepare it, heat up a pan, add oil, meat slivers, and sauce-covered vegetables from a tin. Nowadays, most chop suey ingredients come straight from a can.

Historian Andrew Coe, author of Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States, characterizes the dish as a “brownish, overcooked stew, strangely flavorless, with no redeeming qualities, and redolent of bad school cafeterias and dingy, failing Chinese restaurants.”Ĭoe is on the mark about many American incarnations of the dish. For decades, scholars and foodies have heaped scorn on it. Most people in the English-speaking world know chop suey as a vintage Chinese American dish. Today, we might think this humble dish was out of place on his table. For the occasion, he ordered his cooks to prepare some of the most scrumptious delicacies that money could buy, such as edible bird’s nest, shark fin soup, lake crab, sea cucumber, roast duck, and suckling pig. Tong’s dinner was a study in conspicuous consumption, with hundreds of dishes. The meal was opulent, even by the standards of the city, whose inhabitants were notorious, as contemporaries quipped, for “throwing money around like dirt and dung.” The event took place in Tong’s luxurious quarters in Yangzhou, a metropolis 170 miles north of Shanghai.

Sometime in the late 18th century, a wealthy salt merchant named Tong Yuejin decided to throw a banquet.

Vegetable chop suey