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Chop suey Wikipedia

This article is about the food dish known as chop suey. "Chop Suey!" is also the title of a song in the album Toxicity (album)|Toxicity by System of a Down.
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Chop suey (Traditional Chinese: 雜碎; Simplified Chinese: 杂碎; pinyin: z? su?; Jyutping: zaap6 seoi3; Yale Romanization#Cantonese|Yale: jaāhp seui; literally means mixed pieces; roughly means chopped up odds and ends) is a dish in the style of pseudo-Chinese cuisine. It is said to have been invented in New York on August 29, 1896, by cooks of the China|Chinese diplomat Li Hongzhang who apparently brought his own cooks with him and ate no Western food, even at banquets in his honor. The hoopla about the visit makes all such claims doubtful, but Li Hongzhang's visit gave a boost to Americanized—largely Cantonese cuisine|Cantonese—cuisine. A rival claim for the invention of chop suey places it in California, where Chinese cooks ran cooktents for United States|American miners.

It is not an authentic Chinese dish and is instead considered typical American Chinese cuisine to the point of being the topic of a song in the musical Flower Drum Song.

Chop Suey is mostly a bland stir-fry vegetable dish, with bits of beef or pork, in a lightly-thickened sauce, and with a dash of soy sauce. Typical ingredients for chop suey are usually local vegetables, cooked to American-style softness, and tend to include:

• bamboo shoots

• bok choy, or its Western equivalent celery

• broccoli

• green pepper

• mushrooms

• onion

• sliced Chinese water chestnuts

• snow peas

Last Modified:   2005-04-13