Chop suey Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Chop suey is a plate of leftover vegetables and meat stir-fried quickly with soy sauce. Its name comes from the Cantonese "tsap seui" (odds and ends, a jumble of scraps), written in Chinese as 雑碎. Pork and bean sprouts anchor the dish, with onion and celery bound together by soy sauce. Pork, vegetables, and soy sauce were all familiar staples long present in Old World kitchens.

What gave the dish its particular shape was the fast Cantonese stir-fry that tossed these scraps together, and the place where that technique found its stage. In the Chinatowns of late-19th- and early-20th-century America, restaurants run by immigrants lined the streets. Many of the early immigrants came from Taishan (Toisan) in Guangdong, and they turned the home-kitchen idea of a scrap stir-fry into a dish tuned to the palate of American customers. Chop suey took hold not as a regional dish of mainland China but in the restaurants of the immigrant community in America, made for American diners. This is how a signature dish of Chinese-American cooking came into being in the cities of the United States.

Chop suey comes with its most famous origin story. In 1896, when the Qing statesman Li Hongzhang visited the United States, the dish was supposedly invented for him, or was said to be his favorite. But the dates do not line up. The word "chop suey" appears in the American English press more than a decade before Li's visit. The Chinese-American journalist Wong Chin Foo introduced the dish in a Brooklyn newspaper in the early 1880s, and the earliest citation the Oxford English Dictionary records for the term is an article from 1888. A dish supposedly born in 1896 was already being written about in English eight years earlier.

The researcher Renqiu Yu points out that no record survives of Li Hongzhang eating chop suey in America. Li traveled with three of his own Chinese cooks and had no need to eat local food. The anecdote appears to have been spread by Chinese restaurants in America, trading on the fame of a famous name.

Once Li Hongzhang's origin story falls apart, what remains is a plainer lineage. The ethnobotanist E. N. Anderson tied the dish to the "tsap seui" of Taishan in Guangdong. The Hong Kong physician Li Shu-fan also reported knowing it in Taishan in the 1890s. Andrew Coe, who wrote a history of Chinese food in America, likewise traced the dish as one of the immigrant community. The historian Charles Hayford argued that no single person invented it; rather, Chinese restaurants in America collectively adopted it as a dish that appealed to American diners. The food historian Alan Davidson called the proliferation of origin claims a textbook case of culinary myth-making. The folk story has receded, but no single inventor can be named even now.