Beef Chop Suey
2 sweet peppers 1 tablespoon chopped parsley 2 tablespoons chopped celery Salt and pepper 1½ pounds beefsteak 1 pint tomatoes Choose tender steak and cut it into small pieces. Sauté the vegetables in hot fat or butter and season well; cook for ten or fifteen minutes; then pour over the beef which has been cooked in similar fashion in another pan.
A very Americanized chop suey with no soy, no bean sprouts and no cornstarch — closer to a pepper-and-tomato beef sauté. A few notes on quantities and on the one step that decides whether the beef is tender or grey.
- A pint of tomatoesTwo cups, which may have meant either canned tomatoes with their juice or fresh tomatoes measured cut up. A 14–15 oz can of whole or diced tomatoes, undrained, is a close substitute.
- Sweet peppersGreen bell peppers, seeded and cut in strips or squares. Two average peppers give roughly 2 cups; red or yellow will read as sweeter than the original intended.
- The beef, and the hingeThe recipe says only to choose tender steak and cut it into small pieces, then cook it in hot fat in a separate pan. Keeping the pan hot and not crowding it will keep the meat from stewing.
- "Cooked in similar fashion"Most naturally read as sautéed in hot fat and seasoned; whether the ten to fifteen minutes was meant to apply to the beef as well is not clear from the text.
- Order of operationsThe recipe has the vegetables cooked and seasoned for ten to fifteen minutes, then poured over the separately cooked beef. It does not specify at what point the tomatoes are added.
- FatUse a neutral oil with a high smoke point for the beef; butter will brown too fast at searing heat. Butter is fine for the vegetables.
- Sauce bodyThere is no thickener here, so expect a loose, brothy result. Reducing the tomatoes further before adding the meat is truer to the recipe than adding cornstarch.
- Yield and servingRoughly four servings. Rice was the usual accompaniment for chop suey in this period; fried noodles are sometimes seen as well.
Chop suey — from Cantonese tsap seui, roughly "miscellaneous scraps" — was the single most famous Chinese-American dish of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and by the 1910s and 1920s it had migrated wholesale into mainstream American home cookbooks. What happened on the way is visible in this recipe: the name survived, and almost every distinctively Chinese ingredient dropped out. There is no soy sauce, no bean sprouts, no water chestnuts, no ginger — instead bell peppers, celery, parsley and canned tomatoes, all pantry staples of an American household of the period. A chop suey entry like this one tells you less about Chinese cooking than about how quickly a restaurant novelty could be absorbed, renamed and stripped down for the family supper table.