Credit: Archival Photographic Files,, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. Source: The University of Chicago Archival Photographic files at. Entrance to the Chinese Temple and Theater at the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition. Restaurants were places where you could choose from a menu, not just accept what the host put on the table. Urban Chinese had eaten in restaurants as early as the Song dynasty. One variation on this claim is that chop suey was invented by his cook, another that it was Li and his cook, and yet another by a New York restaurant that Li visited after hours when the cooks were caught off guard and didn’t have the ingredients for a “proper” meal. Chop Suey, therefore, is a mispronunciation of “chopped sewage.” 4Īnother set of claims, as if to compensate for its actual origin among commoners, associates the dish with the 1896 visit to America of Li Hongzhang, China’s leading diplomat and most powerful official. Not knowing any better, those being insulted loved the dish, and much to the amused bewilderment of their tormentors, returned time and again to order it. Still another myth perhaps arose from fears that Chinese might retaliate for racist harassment:Īn angered Chinese cook mixed together the day’s garbage in a bit of broth and presented it to San Francisco restaurant patrons who’d earned his ire. One set of claims is Californian, perhaps from anonymous cooks in a miner’s camp or chefs in San Francisco restaurants. The origins of the American version are surprisingly hard to pin down, and the stories are more like myths than history. Since it was a country dish and not a restaurant item, the travelers who looked for it in Beijing and Shanghai would not have found it. As a dish, chop suey is simply a variation on a standard south China stew-zaptsui in Cantonese or zacui in Mandarin, which means “random mixture.” Generally, the stew included meat and vegetables (almost always including celery and bean sprouts) in a sauce thickened with starch.
3 But, shouldn’t the objection be that it doesn’t taste good, not whether it is or isn’t “authentic?” To be sure, if much Chinese-American restaurant food is too sweet, too salty, too soupy, and deep fried, this is more the fault of the customers than the dishes.Ĭhop suey was not “invented” in the sense that Thomas Edison “invented” the light bulb in a flash of inspiration, at a particular time and place. The website Urban Legends reflects the popularity of this way of thinking even today: “Not everything offered on a Chinese menu is authentically Chinese,” for chop suey is “purely American” (as if an authentic dish could not be both American and Chinese). Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC 20540 USA. Chop Suey.” 2 Li Hung Chang never misses the Sunday Journal. At one cosmopolitan place in Shanghai he found a sign, “American style cooking. A traveler in the East made this discovery. But the truth remains, chop suey is not Chinese. There is all the mystery of the orient in its composition.
FIRST CHOP SUEY FULL
Talk about chop suey is full of the fear that it is not “authentic.” As early as 1912, the San Francisco Call reported that chop sueyĭoes sound Chinese. 1 The humble dish played a key role in their success, yet “chop suey” became an insult, a put-down for things which are mixed together when somebody thinks they ought to be pure. Chang’s, there were more Chinese restaurants in the United States than McDonald’s, Burger Kings, and KFC outlets combined. By the end of the twentieth century, if you include franchise chains such as Panda Express and P.F. Chop suey rose from obscurity in the late nineteenth century to become one of America’s national dishes and one of the main ingredients in the spread of Chinese restaurants in North America during the years when Chinese families and entrepreneurs spread Chinese cookery outside China by adapting to new conditions and inventing new forms. The career of chop suey turns out to be a Cinderella story in reverse: chop suey is the ugly sister whose foot will not fit into the glass slipper.
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