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American Chop Suey
One-half lb. hamburg steak, 1 can Campbell's tomato soup, 2 onions, 1 cup spaghetti. Fry onions in butter or bacon fat, add steak, then soup, and pour over cooked spaghetti.
— Clara W. Taylor
A church-supper skillet dish written in shorthand for cooks who already knew what it should look like. The gaps worth filling are the quantities and the seasoning, which the original leaves entirely to the cook.
- Hamburg steakPlain ground beef, nothing more. Half a pound serves two generously or three modestly; ground beef of this period was often fattier than the leanest grinds sold today, so an 80/20 chuck is a reasonable choice.
- The can of soupCampbell's condensed tomato soup, in a can close to the size still sold today (currently 10.75 oz); earlier can sizes varied. It goes in undiluted -- the recipe expects a thick sauce, not soup with meat in it. Adding the can of water will leave the spaghetti swimming.
- "1 cup spaghetti" is ambiguousIt could mean a cup measured dry or a cup of cooked strands, and the original gives no hint. About 3 to 4 oz dry spaghetti, broken to fit the pan, matches the sauce quantity well.
- Season it yourselfNo salt or pepper is listed, which is normal for community cookbooks of this kind. Condensed tomato soup is already salty and noticeably sweet, so salt the meat lightly and lean on black pepper.
- Brown the beef properly"Add steak" means break it into the onions and cook it through, but let it take some colour before the soup goes in. Once the tomato hits the pan, browning stops.
- Butter or bacon fatBoth would have been on hand in a kitchen of this period; bacon fat gives the dish the smoky backbone it otherwise lacks. Two medium onions is a lot for half a pound of beef -- cook them slowly until soft and sweet rather than merely translucent.
- Poured over, not stirred inAs written this is a sauce over pasta. Later versions of the same dish fold everything together and sometimes bake it with cheese on top; either is faithful enough to the idea.
Despite the name, American chop suey has nothing to do with Chinese cooking beyond borrowing a fashionable word. Chop suey houses were a national craze in the first decades of the twentieth century, and "chop suey" came to mean, loosely, any mixed dish of odds and ends; New England cooks attached it to this particular combination of ground beef, onion, tomato and macaroni or spaghetti, and the name stuck there while the rest of the country came to call much the same thing goulash. The reliance on a branded canned soup gives the recipe an earliest possible date rather than a firm one. Philathea cookbooks were compiled by the Philathea classes, Baptist-rooted Bible study groups for young women that spread widely across North America in the early twentieth century, and were sold to raise funds; the contributions are signed, brief, and assume the reader already cooks.