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American Chop Suey
1 lb. hamburger steak 1 C cooked spaghetti 1 can tomato soup 1 lb. onions 1 green pepper ½ C cooked rice Fry onions and green pepper until brown. Add steak and cook. Mix steak, onions and season with salt and pepper. Add rice and spaghetti and pour over the tomato soup. Mix well and serve hot.
A church-supper skillet dish that assembles in about half an hour. The ingredient list has one clear typesetting casualty and one quantity worth reconsidering.
- "12 C cooked rice"Almost certainly a mangled fraction — 1/2 cup, matching the single cup of spaghetti. Twelve cups of rice against one pound of beef would be inedible ballast. Treat the rice and spaghetti as roughly equal, about a cup each cooked.
- A pound of onionsThat is three or four medium yellow onions, which will reduce a great deal but still dominate. If you want the beef to read as the main element, halve it; if you want the period flavor, keep it and let the onions brown properly rather than just soften.
- Hamburger steakIn American cookbooks of this period the term covers both loose ground beef and a formed patty; the instructions here ('add steak and cook... mix steak, onions') point to loose ground beef. Chuck at around 80/20 works well; drain some fat after browning or the soup will not cling.
- Canned tomato soupCondensed soup, undiluted, straight from the can — that is the whole sauce. A 10.75 oz can is the modern equivalent. Season with salt and pepper as directed, but taste first: the soup brings its own sugar and salt.
- Order of operationsBrown the aromatics first, then the meat in the same pan, so the beef picks up the fond. Adding the starches last and only warming them through keeps the spaghetti from breaking apart.
- Do not simmer longOnce the soup goes in, two or three minutes over medium heat is enough. Extended cooking turns the rice pasty and the spaghetti slack; this is a stir-together, not a stew.
- YieldServes four to six as a luncheon dish, more if stretched with bread and a salad. It reheats acceptably but the pasta softens further.
"American chop suey" is a misnomer twice over: it is neither Chinese nor related to the chop suey served in American Chinese restaurants, which was itself largely a Chinese-American creation. The name came to be applied to quickly assembled mixtures of chopped meat, vegetables and starch — chop suey is generally traced to a Cantonese phrase understood as "odds and ends" — and by the early decades of the twentieth century the dish was established in New England and, less consistently, elsewhere as ground beef, onions, tomato and macaroni. This version's use of both rice and spaghetti, bound with condensed tomato soup, marks it as a product of the canned-goods era, when a single can replaced a made sauce. Its appearance among luncheon dishes in a congregational cook book is characteristic: cheap, forgiving of scale, and assembled from things a household pantry already held.