Gar Lu Chop Suey (With Chinese Dried Mushrooms)

History

Chop suey has roots in Ming Dynasty texts, appearing in the 16th-century novel Journey to the West, where it figures on fancy banquet menus; a version of the dish was even eaten at the Qing court. In the late 18th century, a wealthy salt merchant named Tong Yuejin in Yangzhou served chop suey at an opulent banquet alongside edible bird's nest, shark fin soup, and roast duck. Originally, chop suey was primarily made of organ meats—flavorful and nutrient-rich, widely enjoyed until industrial meat packaging processes changed availability. Anthropologist E. N. Anderson traces the dish to tsap seui, common in Taishan, Guangdong, the home of many early Chinese immigrants to the United States; a Hong Kong doctor likewise reported knowing it in Toisan in the 1890s.

Beginning around 1849, some 25,000 Chinese people moved to California; while some searched for gold, many catered to the growing population through food service. An 1897 article in The Illustrated American reproduces a menu from Ma Hung Low's restaurant on Mott Street in New York's Chinatown which includes "Beef Chop Suey with Bean Sprouts, Water Chestnuts and Boiled Rice." By 1886, journalist Allan Forman described a meal at New York's Mong Sing Wah as a "Celestial Delmonico's," praising "a toothsome stew composed of bean sprouts, chicken's gizzards and livers, calf's tripe, dragon fish, dried and imported from China, pork, chicken and various other ingredients." Rather than being invented whole, the dish was collectively adopted by Chinese American restaurant owners who saw an opportunity to have a dish that Americans would like. As more non-Chinese began eating the dish, restaurant owners realized they could sell more by adapting it to American tastes; all the imported ingredients disappeared, replaced with easily-identifiable meats and essential accompaniments of bean sprouts, onions, and celery.

By the early 1900s, chop suey had become a cultural phenomenon, a beloved ambassador dish to what had been an unfamiliar cuisine to many Americans. The dish was preserved in Sara Bosse and Onoto Watanna's Chinese-Japanese Cook Book, published in Chicago in 1914, at the height of chop suey's popularity across urban America. For roughly six decades from 1900, chop suey ranked among the most widely eaten dishes in the United States. The popularity of chop suey declined after a new interest in China and new immigration into the United States in the mid-20th century pushed new dishes into prominence while chop suey became perceived as inauthentic. Chop suey especially declined in popularity on the West Coast and the East Coast with new Chinese immigration and with more diverse types of food available, while it retained more prominence in the American Midwest, where there was less Chinese immigration.

Ingredients

• 0.5 pound pork
• 0.5 pound beef
• 0.25 clove garlic
• 1 whole onion
• 0.5 bunch celery
• 12 whole lotus seeds
• 0.5 can bamboo shoots
• 1.5 pounds bean sprouts
• 3 tablespoonfuls syou
• 1 teaspoonful salt
• dash cayenne pepper

Instructions

1. Cut half a pound of pork (not too fat) into small pieces and fry to a nice golden brown.
2. Chop half a bunch of celery into small pieces and wash and soak half a pound of Chinese dried mushrooms, discarding the stalks.
3. Chop one onion and a very small piece of garlic very fine.
4. Season with three tablespoonfuls of syou, salt, and a dash of cayenne pepper.
5. Fry the seasoned ingredients for ten minutes.
6. Add half a can of bamboo shoots and fry for five minutes longer.
7. Add one and one half pounds of bean sprouts and cook all together for ten minutes.
8. Serve with rice.