Gar Lu Chop Suey (With Chinese Dried Mushrooms)

History

Chop suey reached print in the United States as a restaurant dish before it reached print as a home one. Beginning around 1849 some twenty-five thousand Chinese people moved to California, and while some searched for gold, many fed the growing population instead. The dish that carried their kitchens into the American imagination was a mixed stew, and for its first decades in this country it was something an outsider went to Chinatown to eat rather than something he cooked.

One of the earliest descriptions of it comes from the journalist Allan Forman, who ate in a Chinatown restaurant and wrote the meal up afterwards. "Chow-chop suey was the first dish we attacked," he reported. "It is a toothsome stew, composed of bean sprouts, chicken's gizzards and livers, calfe's tripe, dragon fish, dried and imported from China, pork, chicken, and various other ingredients which I was unable to make out." The whole meal, he noted with some astonishment, cost sixty-three cents.

Rather than being invented whole, the dish was adopted by Chinese American restaurant owners who saw an opportunity in something Americans would like. As more non-Chinese began eating it, the imported ingredients Forman could not identify disappeared, replaced with easily recognizable meats and the bean sprouts, onions and celery that became its signature. The version preserved in Sara Bosse and Onoto Watanna's Chinese-Japanese Cook Book, published in Chicago in 1914, catches the dish at the height of its popularity across urban America.

Its later decline is easier to describe than to date. Chop suey lost ground on both coasts as new Chinese immigration brought a wider range of dishes and the older stew came to be treated as inauthentic, while it held on longer in the Midwest, where there was less new immigration to displace it.

Three things an earlier version of this note carried are no longer here. It quoted a menu line from an 1897 magazine article, which we could not find anywhere but an encyclopedia entry — and we do not put quotation marks around words we cannot trace. It also placed the dish in a sixteenth-century Chinese novel and at a Yangzhou salt merchant's banquet in the late eighteenth century. Those we learned from popular reference and food-writing sources, and we were unable to locate the evidence they rest on.

Ingredients

• 1/2 pound pork
• 1/2 pound beef
• 1/4 clove garlic
• 1 whole onion
• 1/2 bunch celery
• 12 whole lotus seeds
• 1/2 can bamboo shoots
• 1 1/2 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.