Cut all the meat of a chicken into thin strips; season with black pepper, and cayenne, and fry in hot lard. Add some ham, onion, celery, green bean sprouts and mushrooms cut fine. Moisten with ½ cup of stock. Add ¼ cup of Chinese sauce; cover and let simmer until tender. Thicken the sauce with flour; add 2 tablespoonfuls of cream and chopped parsley. Serve hot on a platter with boiled rice.
A daybook recipe written in shorthand: no quantities for the vegetables, no pan specified, and one ingredient name that no longer means anything definite. A few decisions have to be made before you start.
- "Chinese sauce"Most likely soy sauce, which nineteenth-century American cookbooks sometimes referred to under Chinese names. A quarter cup of modern soy sauce with only half a cup of stock will be very salty; start with two tablespoons and adjust.
- Quantities to fill inFor one chicken (about 3 lb, yielding roughly 1 lb of strips) figure 4 oz ham, one onion, two ribs celery, 4 oz mushrooms and 6-8 oz bean sprouts. Serves four over rice.
- Bean sprouts go in lastThis is the hinge. Sprouts collapse to wet string in a covered simmer; add them in the final minute or two so they keep their snap, and treat the mushrooms the same way.
- "Simmer until tender"Thin strips of raw chicken are done in five to eight minutes; taken literally the instruction overcooks the meat.
- Lard and the panLard is fine and gives a clean high-heat fry; peanut oil behaves the same way. Use a wide skillet or wok and cook the chicken in batches, or it steams instead of browning.
- ThickeningFlour in a soy-based sauce turns cloudy and pasty. A slurry of one teaspoon cornstarch in a tablespoon of cold water is what the dish actually wants, stirred in off the boil.
- The cream and parsleyBoth are American additions, uncommon in Chinese cooking. They can be left out with no loss; the dish reads more plainly without them.
Chop suey, from Cantonese tsap seui, roughly "assorted scraps," was a signature dish of Chinese-American restaurants from the 1890s through the mid-twentieth century. Its origins are disputed: it is often credited to Cantonese immigrant cooks in California and New York, though some accounts trace it to a rural dish of the Toisan district of Guangdong, the home region of most of those immigrants. By the time this daybook appeared it was naturalized enough that a general-audience cookbook could print it as the representative "Chinese" dish for the year, alongside Hungarian beef stew and a Jewish shalet, and its author felt free to finish it with cream and chopped parsley. The recipe is a useful record of how a borrowed dish gets absorbed: the soy sauce, bean sprouts and rice survive the crossing, while the flour thickening, the ham and the dairy show a cook working from an American repertoire and reaching for the nearest familiar techniques.