Then pour in soy sauce and voilà, you have a quick weeknight meal composed of soggy bean sprouts, soft water chestnuts, and faded pink bell peppers. To prepare it, heat up a pan, add oil, meat slivers, and sauce-covered vegetables from a tin.
Nowadays, most chop suey ingredients come straight from a can. Historian Andrew Coe, author of Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States, characterizes the dish as a “brownish, overcooked stew, strangely flavorless, with no redeeming qualities, and redolent of bad school cafeterias and dingy, failing Chinese restaurants.”Ĭoe is on the mark about many American incarnations of the dish. For decades, scholars and foodies have heaped scorn on it. Most people in the English-speaking world know chop suey as a vintage Chinese American dish. Today, we might think this humble dish was out of place on his table. For the occasion, he ordered his cooks to prepare some of the most scrumptious delicacies that money could buy, such as edible bird’s nest, shark fin soup, lake crab, sea cucumber, roast duck, and suckling pig. Tong’s dinner was a study in conspicuous consumption, with hundreds of dishes. The meal was opulent, even by the standards of the city, whose inhabitants were notorious, as contemporaries quipped, for “throwing money around like dirt and dung.” The event took place in Tong’s luxurious quarters in Yangzhou, a metropolis 170 miles north of Shanghai. There were tea-rooms, cafeterias, Hungarian cafes, chop suey restaurants.Sometime in the late 18th century, a wealthy salt merchant named Tong Yuejin decided to throw a banquet. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright Oriental goods, Scraggs, is silks an' satins, rice, chop suey, punk, an' idols an' fan tan layouts. "A Diversity of Creatures" by Rudyard Kipling He brought them to the Red Amber Room of the Chop Suey. "For Luncheon and Supper Guests" by Alice Bradley Put some well-seasoned cooked rice on a platter, pour over the chop suey and serve very hot.īoiled rice may be served with Chow Mein or Chop Suey.
#Chop suey meaning driver
You've had a swelled head ever since that hose-cart driver took you out to a chop suey joint. Paul returned four days later, and the Babbitts and Rieslings went festively to the movies and had chop suey at a Chinese restaurant. Spaghetti and chop suey and dairy lunches nestle side by side. Įar Candy contributor Dave Lichterman caught Julian Plenti at Chop Suey last week. Julian Plenti (aka Paul Banks of Interpol ) Chop Suey 11.09.09. Just ask Chop Suey Books' best cat, WonTon. The Hood Internet hits Chop Suey on July 26. Today Reverb Recommends Experiencing Anomie Belle's Trip-Hop at Chop Suey. What they'll play live Saturday at Seattle's Chop Suey is anybody's guess. į atty Crab's hustling impresario Zak Pelaccio is still fine-tuning his Pan-Asian riff at Chop Suey as our foursome settles into the glass-wrapped second-story nest at the Renaissance hotel overlooking Times Square's neon rat-a-tat. įood Chain / Food & Drink One Bite: Bohemian Chop Suey. It's a dish that's as Irish as pepperoni pizza is Italian and chop suey is Chinese. įrom our "Lunch Lessons" series, try this American chop suey recipe from Alton Central School. Minutes before midnight on a Monday in August, more than 100 people are getting down at the 500-person capacity Capitol Hill club Chop Suey.