Chop Suey
Cut in 1-inch strips 1 pound white meat of chicken, or pork, veal, crab or lobster meat, and cook 5 minutes in frying pan in 2 tablespoons chicken or other fat. Cut 1 cup celery in thin slices crosswise, add 1 onion peeled and cut in thin slices 6 mushroom caps peeled and sliced 6 Chinese water chestnuts peeled and sliced. Cook vegetables 5 minutes in 2 tablespoons chicken fat or butter. Add 1/2 pound bean sprouts 1/4 pound bamboo shoots cut in diamond-shaped pieces 1 teaspoon Soyu sauce 2 cups chicken stock or water and the cooked meat, and simmer gently until bean sprouts and meat are thoroughly cooked. Season with Salt and Few grains pepper.
A straightforward stir-and-simmer dish that assumes a hot pan and canned pantry staples. The one thing worth changing is the final cooking time.
- The hinge: do not simmer the sprouts"Simmer gently until bean sprouts and meat are thoroughly cooked" will reduce fresh mung sprouts to limp threads. Add them in the last two to three minutes, only long enough to heat through and lose their raw edge.
- Soyu sauceAn older transliteration of shoyu, i.e. soy sauce. One teaspoon for two cups of stock is very restrained by modern palates; start with a tablespoon and season at the end, remembering the added salt.
- Water chestnuts and bamboo shootsBoth were sold fresh or in brine in Chinese groceries and are now almost always canned. Drain and rinse them; skip the instruction to peel. Canned bamboo shoots benefit from a brief blanch to shed the tinny taste.
- MushroomsPeeling mushroom caps was standard practice when they came field-dirty. Wipe modern cultivated mushrooms and slice, caps and stems both.
- Meat temperaturesFive minutes in the pan plus the simmer is ample, but check rather than trust the clock: pork and veal to 145F, chicken to 165F. Crab and lobster meat is usually sold already cooked and then needs only to be warmed at the very end or it turns stringy.
- It will be soupyTwo cups of stock with no thickener gives a brothy dish. Many chop suey recipes of the period were finished with a tablespoon of cornstarch slaked in cold water, stirred in at the end until the sauce just coats; do that if you want the familiar glossy texture.
- Heat and fatChicken fat is the first option given here and gives the right flavor; butter browns and scorches at high heat, so use oil if you are working hot. Cook the meat in a single layer so it sears rather than steams.
- YieldA pound of meat with this quantity of vegetables serves four over rice, or six as one dish in a larger meal.
Chop suey is Chinese-American rather than Chinese: the name comes from Cantonese tsap seui, roughly "miscellaneous odds and ends," describing a mixed dish of meat and vegetables in a light sauce. Its arrival in mainstream American eating is often traced to the 1896 United States visit of the Qing statesman Li Hongzhang, a story repeated so widely that it is best treated as legend; what is documented is the explosion of chop suey restaurants in New York and other cities around the turn of the twentieth century, and the appearance of recipes in general-purpose English-language cookbooks soon after. Its inclusion here marks the point at which chop suey had stopped being exotic and become respectable company food, cooked at home from a shopping list that assumed a nearby source of bean sprouts, bamboo shoots and water chestnuts.