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Chop Suey (T Chop Suey sauce T cooking)
4 T Chop Suey sauce 1 T cooking molasses 1 T flour Cube veal and brown in butter. To this add 1 cup boiling water and 4 tablespoons Chop Suey Sauce. Pour this over vegetables, cover tight and cook until vegetables are tender. Stir flour and molasses together, add to vegetables. If desired, add 1 can of bean sprouts and mushrooms. Mrs. Chas. H. Kaiser.
The recipe as printed assumes you already know the proportions: it names a sauce, a thickener and a sweetener, then refers to "vegetables" that were never listed. Treat it as a method rather than a formula.
- T means tablespoonThe recipe itself spells it out, giving "4 tablespoons Chop Suey Sauce" for the "4 T" of the ingredient list. Four T is 1/4 cup, and the flour and molasses are one tablespoon each.
- The missing quantitiesNo weight of veal and no vegetable list is given. About 1 1/2 lb of veal shoulder cut in 3/4-inch cubes suits the single cup of water and quarter-cup of sauce; for vegetables, sliced onion, celery and a little green pepper, roughly 4 cups total, is a reasonable guess at what was meant.
- Chop Suey sauceA bottled American grocery product of the era, dark and salty, apparently soy-based. Soy sauce is the usual modern stand-in, though it may well be saltier and less sweet than the bottled sauce, so taste before adding more.
- Cooking molassesA trade term for a baking-grade molasses; use an ordinary unsulphured one rather than blackstrap, which is bitter enough to take over the dish. It is here for colour and a touch of sweetness against the salt of the sauce.
- The hinge is the thickeningFlour stirred dry into molasses makes a stiff paste that will lump the moment it hits hot liquid. Slacken it with a few spoonfuls of the pan liquid first, then stir it back in and let it come to a simmer for a minute or two to lose the raw-flour taste.
- Cooking timeCubed veal shoulder wants 45 minutes to an hour of covered simmering to become tender; the vegetables will be soft well before that. If you want celery and pepper with any bite left, brown and braise the veal first and add the vegetables for the last 10 to 15 minutes.
- Canned sprouts and mushroomsBoth are optional in the original and both go in at the end, drained and rinsed, just long enough to heat through. Canned bean sprouts are limp by nature; fresh ones added in the last minute keep their snap.
- YieldWith the quantities above, four servings over rice.
Chop suey was an American invention with Chinese parentage, generally traced to Chinese restaurant cooks in California and New York in the later nineteenth century, and it spread inland far enough to reach community cookbooks. What makes this version telling is the bottled "Chop Suey sauce" and the can of bean sprouts: grocery manufacturers had already packaged the dish's flavour and texture for cooks with no access to fresh Chinese ingredients. The veal, the butter and the flour-and-molasses thickening mark it as a thoroughly domesticated recipe - an exotic name attached to a braise a home cook could make from what she had.