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Chop Suey (Mrs A L Johnson small dessert)
Mrs. A. L. Johnson. 1 small dessert dish Chinese sauce 1 can Bean sprouts 6 good sized onions 2T Chop Suey molasses Fry meat until good and brown and pour little water on and let simmer until tender. Cut onions and celery in small pieces and cook until nearly done. Put into kettle, adding meat, onions, celery, bean sprouts and mushrooms. Heat through, then add sauce and Chinese potatoes (do not cook potatoes). Thicken with a little flour. Serve with rice or chow mein noodles. Very good.
Chicken or veal may be used in this same manner, only cook before using instead of frying first.
Mrs. A. C. Brockman. 1½ lbs. veal shoulder 2 bunches celery 4 onions 1 C hot water
Two contributions have run together on the page: Mrs. Johnson's ingredient list is missing its meat and mushrooms, and Mrs. Brockman's list breaks off before her sauces. Treat the method as one recipe and build the quantities yourself.
- What the amounts actually areMrs. Johnson gives no weight of meat and no quantity of mushrooms or celery, though the method calls for both; the meat is unnamed (chicken or veal are given as substitutes, which suggests pork for the original). For roughly the scale implied, and borrowing from Mrs. Brockman's fragment, use 1½ to 2 lb of pork shoulder or veal, 2 bunches of celery, the 6 onions Mrs. Johnson calls for, a standard can of bean sprouts and 8 oz of mushrooms. T is tablespoon, C is cup.
- Chop suey molassesA bottled dark syrup sold under that name in the early twentieth century for this sort of dish; it was evidently not the same thing as American baking molasses, and was probably closer to a dark soy or thin caramel syrup, though the exact composition is not certain. Two teaspoons of dark soy sauce plus a teaspoon of brown sugar will give roughly the colour and sweetness the recipe is after.
- Chinese sauceMost likely bottled soy, though the recipe does not say; a dessert dish is a small individual bowl, so figure 3 to 4 fl oz. That is a lot of soy by modern taste, so start with half and taste.
- Chinese potatoesProbably water chestnuts, which would explain why the recipe insists they not be cooked. Drain a can and stir them in at the very end so they keep their snap; simmering turns them soft and pointless.
- Canned bean sproutsDrain and rinse them, and add them with the water chestnuts rather than at the start. Canned sprouts are already fully cooked and go slimy with further heat. Fresh mung bean sprouts, if you have them, need only a minute in the hot pan.
- Celery and onion"Cook until nearly done" means simmered or sweated until the celery bends but still has body — 6 to 8 minutes. The dish depends on the vegetables holding some texture against the soft meat.
- ThickeningA flour thickening will taste raw unless it cooks a couple of minutes; a slurry of 1 tablespoon cornstarch in 2 tablespoons cold water, stirred in and brought back to a simmer, gives the glossy sauce this dish is usually eaten with.
- YieldWith the quantities above, six servings over steamed rice or chow mein noodles.
Chop suey is Chinese-American rather than Chinese, its name generally traced to the Cantonese tsap seui, "miscellaneous scraps" — a catch-all stir-fry of meat and vegetables in a thickened soy sauce that spread out from Chinese restaurants in San Francisco and New York in the late nineteenth century and became a national craze by the 1900s. Its appearance in a community cookbook of this kind shows how far it had travelled: by the time these women were trading recipes, canned bean sprouts and bottled "chop suey molasses" were grocery items an American home cook could buy. The instruction to substitute chicken or veal, and the flour thickening in place of cornstarch, show a cook fitting an unfamiliar dish to familiar habits.