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Chop Suey
Take ½ pound of figs, chop them into small pieces, ½ pound of dates, seed them and cut them in small squares; 1 pound of English walnuts chopped rather fine. Add syrup enough to make 2 quarts, flavor with vanilla and color a rich red. Fill a sundae glass two-thirds full of ice cream, pour over it a ladle of chop suey, top off with a couple of pieces of pineapple either side of a cherry. Have a brilliantly colored window strip with chop suey printed on and a little Chinaman sketched in the corner.
A fountain topping — a chopped fruit-and-nut syrup ladled over ice cream — rather than anything to do with the stir-fried dish it borrows its name from. It comes together in fifteen minutes and keeps like a preserve conserve, but the proportions assume commercial fountain syrup.
- "Syrup enough to make 2 quarts"Most likely plain fountain syrup, sugar dissolved in water (fountain practice ran heavy, in the region of two parts sugar to one of water by weight), boiled briefly and cooled; the recipe does not say. The fruit and nuts occupy a good deal of the volume, so expect to need somewhere near 1 to 1¼ quarts of syrup to bring the total to two.
- Yield and portionTwo quarts is a fountain batch, enough for a few dozen sundaes at a ladle apiece. Quarter the recipe for home use.
- English walnutsSimply the common walnut, as distinguished from the native American black walnut, which is oilier and much stronger. Use ordinary walnut halves and chop them; black walnuts will overwhelm the figs.
- Figs and datesDried figs, stems trimmed. Modern Medjool and Deglet Noor dates are usually sold pitted already. Both fruits chop far more easily if the knife is oiled or the fruit briefly frozen.
- "Color a rich red"Period fountains coloured with coal-tar dyes, several of which were later withdrawn. A few drops of modern red food colouring does the same job, though the mixture is handsome enough left in its natural brown.
- Keeping itThe sugar concentration preserves the fruit, but the walnuts will go soft and eventually rancid. Refrigerate and use within a week or two; nuts can be held back and stirred into the syrup as needed.
- Serving temperatureLadle it cold or barely cool. Warm syrup on ice cream collapses the scoop before it reaches the counter.
Soda fountains of the 1900s and 1910s named sundaes the way vaudeville named acts — for novelty, topicality and whatever was in the newspapers. Chop suey itself was a Chinese-American restaurant dish, generally traced to Chinese cooks in the United States in the later nineteenth century and wildly fashionable in New York and other cities by about 1900, to the point that "chop suey joints" drew crowds who had never eaten Chinese food otherwise. The name was borrowed at the fountain for a chopped fruit-and-nut topping, trading on the word's currency; the dish has no relation to the restaurant one. The instruction to paint a caricature on the window strip is part of the same commercial logic, and is a plain record of how casually American advertising traded in racial caricature — which is why the text is reproduced here unaltered.