Chop suey. Sounds Chinese, looks Chinese. There
was no reason to question its Chinese credentials, until word slowly
started to spread that chop suey is not really Chinese at all,
but a dish invented in America for American tastes. Chop suey was
first concocted in a San Francisco restaurant in the late 19th
century. The story goes that, having sold out of food, the restaurant
was in the process of closing for the evening, when a group of
unsavoury characters arrived, demanding a meal. The cook felt compelled
to improvise from leftover kitchen scraps. These bits and pieces
were combined in a wok, and what emerged a few minutes later was
chop suey, soon to become America's favourite (but unauthentic)
Chinese dish. There are variations on this tale, but according
to anthropologist En. N. Anderson none of them are true. The real
origin of chop suey, Anderson says, lies far to the west of the
Golden Gate Bridge, in Taishan (Toishan), a county (now a city)
of the Pearl River Delta in southern Guangdong, China. Taishan
was home to 60 percent of Chinese migrants to America in the second
half of the 19th century – surrounding counties supplied
most of the other 40 percent. For a hundred years the food served
by these folks in America and other countries, completely defined
western perceptions of Chinese cuisine. Taishan is known for dishes
that combine many different kinds of vegetables – your basic
mixed stir fry, something uncommon in other parts of China. So
is chop suey a real Chinese dish? Yes. Is it Americanised? No doubt.
Chinese rarely sit down to a lunch or dinner that does not include soup (in the case of noodle soup, soup is the meal). Unlike the Western custom of having soup before the main course, Chinese prefer to eat soup during or towards the end of a meal. At a casual meal people tend to pick up the bowl and drink directly from it … more
