Chow Mein
Cut in 1-inch strips 1 pound fresh pork or white meat of chicken, or lobster or crab meat, and cook in frying pan 5 minutes with 2 tablespoons fat. Add 1 cup water or stock mixed with 1 teaspoon cornstarch. Simmer 3 minutes or until meat is tender. In another frying pan put 2 tablespoons fat, add 1 onion cut lengthwise in very fine pieces. Cook 3 minutes, add 1 bunch celery cut in very fine strips 2 inches long, and 1/4 pound dried mushrooms soaked 2 hours in Cold water, drained and cut in thin slices. Cook 3 minutes, stirring constantly. Combine mixtures, add 1 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper and Few grains cayenne. Pour over fried noodles. If desired 1/2 pound bean sprouts may be cooked with the celery, and served in the Chow Mein. With Chow Mein pass Soyu sauce. Boiled rice may be served with Chow Mein or Chop Suey.
A Chinese-American restaurant dish translated for a home cook working with two frying pans and no wok. The method still works; a few of the quantities and ingredient names need reading.
- "Soyu sauce"An early spelling of soy sauce, probably reflecting the Japanese shoyu (the source of the English word "soy"). Any ordinary Japanese or Chinese light soy sauce is what is meant; the recipe passes it at table rather than cooking it into the dish.
- FatAn unspecified cooking fat, which in American kitchens of this period would typically have been lard or a solid vegetable shortening. A neutral high-smoke-point oil does the same job.
- A quarter pound of dried mushroomsA very large amount by modern standards, since shiitake or wood ear swell to several times their dry weight. Two ounces is closer to what the finished dish wants. Hot water shortens the two-hour soak considerably, and the strained soaking liquid is better than plain water in the sauce.
- The cornstarchOne teaspoon to a cup of stock gives a barely-there gloss, not the thick sauce most people expect from chow mein now. Double it if you want the sauce to cling. Mix it into cold liquid before it meets the pan.
- HeatThe instruction to cook the vegetables three minutes "stirring constantly" assumes a hot pan. Keep the celery and onion crisp; the whole point of the two-pan method is that the vegetables never stew in the meat juices.
- Bean sproutsAdd them in the last minute rather than for the full celery cooking time. They collapse quickly and contribute nothing once limp.
- Fried noodlesThe recipe does not say which. The crisp deep-fried noodles sold in tins as chow mein noodles will do; fresh boiled egg noodles, drained and pan-crisped, are the other reading.
- YieldA pound of meat with a full bunch of celery serves four generously, or six as one dish among several.
Chow mein is a rendering of Cantonese chaau mihn, stir-fried noodles, and it reached American home cookbooks by way of the chop suey houses that spread out of Chinese communities in New York and San Francisco in the decades around 1900. The recipe's willingness to substitute pork, chicken, lobster or crab, and its pairing with boiled rice rather than more noodles, shows how far the dish had already drifted from anything cooked in Guangdong: what survived the crossing was the technique of fast-cooked meat and shredded vegetables bound with a little starch, which is the part that still makes it worth cooking.