Home › Unusual Recipes › Chop Suey
Chop Suey
1½ pounds round of beef or 5 tablespoons Mazola lean fresh pork 1½ tablespoons Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch 2 cups coarsely diced celery 3 medium sized onions, sliced 1 tablespoon Karo, Blue Label 1 pint bean sprouts, optional (these may be purchased canned) Salt, pepper and Worcestershire sauce to taste Boiled rice Cut the meat in small cubes, dust with salt, pepper and the cornstarch and brown in the Mazola. Add the celery, onions, bean sprouts and Karo and simmer a few minutes. Half cover with boiling water and simmer until the meat is tender, about an hour. Season to taste with the Worcestershire sauce. Serve with the boiled rice which has been pressed into custard cups to shape, then turned out. Soy sauce may be used instead of the Worcestershire. It can be obtained at Chinese restaurants. F
A corn-products advertising recipe rather than a Chinese one, and the ingredient list has been mangled by the original two-column typesetting. Read it as 1½ lb round of beef or lean fresh pork, 5 tablespoons Mazola, and 1½ tablespoons cornstarch.
- The branded ingredientsMazola is corn oil, Argo and Kingsford's are plain cornstarch, and Karo Blue Label was one of the lighter grades of corn syrup. Any neutral oil, any cornstarch and 1 tablespoon of light corn syrup will do.
- This is a stew, not a stir-fryAn hour of simmering under a half-cover of water is braising. Expect a soft, gravy-bound dish rather than the crisp-tender vegetables of a restaurant chop suey; if you want the latter, you want a different recipe.
- Hold the celery backTwo cups of diced celery cooked for an hour with the meat will collapse entirely. Simmer the meat alone, then add the celery and onion in the last 10 to 15 minutes.
- Bean sproutsCanned sprouts, as suggested here, are already soft and need only to be heated through. Fresh mung sprouts need well under a minute and should go in at the very end.
- The cornstarch dustingDredging the cubed meat is what thickens the finished gravy, so brown the pieces in a wide pan without crowding. Piled up, the starch turns pasty and the meat steams instead of browning.
- Worcestershire or soyThe note that soy sauce "can be obtained at Chinese restaurants" dates the page; it is now on every supermarket shelf. Start with 2 tablespoons of soy, taste, and salt cautiously afterward.
- Molded ricePack hot boiled rice firmly into greased custard cups or small ramekins, let it sit a minute, then invert onto the plate. Short- or medium-grain rice holds the shape; long-grain tends to crumble.
- YieldServes four with the rice.
This comes from one of the promotional cookbooks issued by the makers of Mazola, Argo cornstarch and Karo syrup, which is why several of the ingredients carry brand names and why corn syrup turns up in a savory braise at all — such books existed to find new uses for the sponsor's products. Chop suey itself is generally traced to Chinese-American cooks in the late nineteenth century, and by the 1920s it had become the American public's shorthand for Chinese food, popular enough to be worth a page in a book aimed at home cooks who had eaten it in a restaurant but never made it. The tell-tale details are the Worcestershire sauce standing in for soy and the assumption that soy had to be sourced from a Chinese restaurant: this is a dish being translated for a pantry that had no Asian ingredients in it, served in a neat molded dome to look like company food.