![]() ![]() In this myth, Americans are the butt of a Chinese joke, eating the leftovers or "beggar's hash," which we now call chop suey. They arrived just as the doors were shutting, and the cook, wanting to avoid trouble, threw all the leftovers in a bowl with a thick sauce and served it. In one tale from his book, an American businessman claims that late one night a group of white miners decided to finally try Chinese food. "There were all these rumors about how chop suey was born," says Coe. By the 1860s, damaging "firsthand" accounts of Chinese people eating rats appeared in newspapers, and a general xenophobia set in. Some daring whites tried Chinese delicacies of shark's fin soup and swallow's nest soup, but Coe writes that "it became politically and socially dangerous to admit to having a taste for Chinese cuisine" as fear that the Chinese were taking valuable jobs escalated. The first Chinatowns appeared along the railway line in places like San Francisco and Portland. Most didn't speak English, and with no reason to assimilate into the violently racist population, they largely kept to themselves and set up small communities with restaurants, Laundromats and grocery stores. They were mostly poor male laborers who worked first as gold miners, then later on the First Transcontinental Railroad. The first Chinese immigrants began to arrive in California during the Gold Rush in the late 1840s. In many ways, the story of the dish is also the story of Chinese immigration to the U.S. How did this happen?"Ĭreation myths abound about chop suey's mysterious rise to fame in the early 20th century. Army mess halls to cafés out in rural Oklahoma, everybody had chop suey. "You see these signs, you do all the research and you realize that chop suey was one of the most popular foods in America," Coe says. "I thought, where did this come from and where did it go?" The question begged for further investigation. "I had seen this photograph of Chinatown in the 1940s, and all the restaurants had signs saying 'Chop Suey,'" he says. So what is chop suey exactly? That's what Coe himself wanted to know several years ago when he was doing research at the New York Public Library for another book on the city's history and noticed something curious. In fact, the restaurant offers four varieties of the stuff: beef, chicken, roast pork and shrimp. Luckily for our purposes, there remain a few unfashionably antiquated locations that still serve the dubious-sounding dish, Hop Kee being one. Those who remember it at all know it only as a preparation of sliced pork or chicken cooked with bean sprouts, onions, celery, bamboo shoots, and water chestnuts until everything is mushy and flavorless, then served with a gummy, translucent sauce over white rice." to mention chop suey in the title - a funny coincidence that nicely demonstrates just how popular and ubiquitous this particular dish used to be.Īs Coe writes in his book, "Today, chop suey is a relic in most parts of the United States, another food fad that has ended up on the trash heap of culinary history. Published in 2009, Coe's book is one of at least two existing cultural histories of Chinese food in the U.S. Coe, dressed smartly in a polo shirt, jeans and glasses, is the author of Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States. But if you never picked up chopsticks during the middle of the last century, you probably haven't tried chop suey and don't know much else about it. We watch steaming piles of Cantonese-style crabs and whole fish fly past us, but we won't be eating any of that. The décor is simple and outdated, and the florescent lights are a bit much. "They were the first Chinese people who came here." "It's one of the few old-time Taishanese restaurants," says Andrew Coe, sitting across from me in one of the venue's burgundy-colored booths. ![]()
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