American Chop Suey

American Chop Suey
American food culture was formed in an environment that was resource-rich and labor poor. There has always been a premium on one-pot sautés or quick stews and these have sometimes acquired financial names like slumgullion (perhaps from Salmagundi), or mulligan stew (perhaps from slumgullion), or Finnish American mojaka (perhaps from mulligan stew).

In old New England, a random collection of smothered meat and potatoes was known as potato bargain or necessity mess.

A quasi Italian casserole from Columbus, Ohio, spread across the country as Johnny Mazzetti with numerous variations.

During the Great Depression, the names of foreign mixed dishes, such as goulash, hodgepodge (perhaps from hachepot), chop suey, were applied to quick assortment of meat, vegetables and potatoes and sometimes even to dessert with mixed ingredients.

American chop suey, however, eventually became somewhat standardized, especially in institutional catering, as a stew or casserole of beef, celery and macaroni-none of which seems especially Chinese.

Chinese restaurant chop suey was itself a poorly define American invention and basically another mixed stew.

A likely origin for American chop suey is the recipe for Chop Suey stew in the 1916 Manual for Army Cooks, an urtext for many institution foods of the twentieth century.

The army recipe should be made with either beef round or pork shoulder, beef stock, barbeque sauce and salt. By 1932 the Navy’s cookbook had added cabbage and green peppers.

Practical Home Economics (1919) has a recipe entitled “Chop Suey” that adds tomatoes and parsley and omits the onion and cabbage.

All these early recipes leave out soy sauce but suggest serving the stew over rice. More recent recipes simplify the service by dropping the rice and mixing in cooked macaroni, but they tend to restore some amount of soy sauce unless using Italian tomato sauce.

As distinct from Chinese restaurant chop suey, American chop suey in the early twenty first century is usually made with beef instead of pork; the vegetable are usually restricted to celery and onions, and macaroni often replaces rice.
American Chop Suey