US National Chop Suey Day
<p>In 1929 Edward Hopper painted two women at a table in a second-floor restaurant, a red-and-yellow “CHOP SUEY” sign glowing in the window behind them. The painting, simply titled <em>Chop Suey</em>, captured a very particular American moment: by the 1920s, the chop suey house had become an ordinary lunch spot where typists and telephone operators grabbed a cheap, hot meal between shifts. That a Cantonese phrase meaning roughly “odds and ends” ended up in neon over a New York street, and then on a canvas that sold for ninety-two million dollars in 2018, is the strange and very American story that US National Chop Suey Day, observed each 29 August, quietly celebrates.</p>
<h2 id="a-name-without-a-homeland">A name without a homeland</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>Chop suey is usually described as Chinese-American, but it is more honestly described as American with a Chinese name. The phrase derives from the Cantonese <em>tsap seui</em>, “miscellaneous bits” or “assorted scraps”, and the dish it names is a stir-fry of quickly cooked meat or tofu with vegetables in a light, thickened sauce over rice or noodles. In China itself, chop suey has long been regarded as a foreign or overseas creation rather than a native dish, which tells you most of what you need to know: it was invented by Chinese immigrants in America, improvising with the ingredients they could get, for customers whose palates they were learning to read.</p>
<h2 id="the-li-hung-chang-legend-and-why-it-is-wrong">The Li Hung Chang legend, and why it is wrong</h2>
<p>The most repeated origin story credits the Qing statesman Li Hung Chang, who toured the United States in 1896. In the popular telling, his personal chef, asked to produce something that would suit both Chinese and American tastes, threw together whatever was on hand and named it chop suey. It is a tidy story, and it is almost certainly false. The food historian Renqiu Yu, who searched the available records, found no evidence that Li ate anything called chop suey on his visit; contemporaries noted that Li distrusted Western food and travelled with his own cooks. More decisively, the Oxford English Dictionary records the phrase “chop suey” in print in 1888, eight years before Li set foot in America. The dish was already on menus before the man supposed to have invented it arrived. What Li’s celebrity visit did do was set off a craze for all things Chinese in New York, sending curious diners into Chinatown, so he deserves credit for popularising chop suey even if he did not create it.</p>
<p>The likelier truth is less romantic and more interesting. Cantonese immigrants, most from the Toishan region of Guangdong, were cooking simplified, adaptable versions of rural southern Chinese dishes on the American West Coast from the mid-nineteenth century onward, scaling the seasoning and ingredients to local supply and local taste. Chop suey was the dish that crossed over.</p>
<p>It crossed over, moreover, under harsh conditions worth remembering. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred most Chinese immigration and shut Chinese workers out of mining, manufacturing and many other trades. Restaurants and laundries were among the few businesses left open to them, partly because they required little capital and competed for nobody else’s job. Cooking, in other words, was not always a chosen vocation but a refuge forced by law, and the chop suey house grew directly out of that constraint. The dish that came to stand for an entire cuisine in the American imagination was shaped by the narrow set of opportunities a hostile country allowed its makers.</p>
<h2 id="the-rise-of-the-chop-suey-house">The rise of the chop suey house</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>By the early twentieth century, “chop suey” had become shorthand for Chinese food itself, and chop suey houses spread through American cities. They mattered for reasons beyond the food. Often staying open late, affordable, and welcoming to a broad cross-section of society, they were for many Americans the first restaurant of any non-European cuisine they ever entered. The dish functioned as an ambassador, easing unfamiliar flavours into the mainstream and laying the groundwork for the far wider acceptance of regional Chinese cooking that came decades later. Hopper’s 1929 painting is a document of this exact period, when the chop suey house had matured from novelty into an unremarkable feature of the working city. The same arc, of an immigrant dish moving from curiosity to comfort food, connects chop suey to other naturalised American favourites such as the layered ice-cream confection celebrated on <a href="/specialdate/us-national-spumoni-day/">US National Spumoni Day</a>.</p>
<h2 id="what-goes-into-it">What goes into it</h2>
<p>The defining quality of chop suey is its flexibility, and that flexibility is the whole point. A protein, chicken, pork, beef, shrimp or tofu, is stir-fried fast over high heat, then combined with whatever vegetables are crisp and available: bean sprouts, celery, water chestnuts, bamboo shoots, onions, cabbage. The vegetables are cooked only until just tender so they keep their snap. A light sauce, typically soy seasoned and thickened with cornflour, binds it all, and the result is served over steamed rice or crisp fried noodles. Because almost any combination works, chop suey has always been an economical dish, a way to turn the contents of a kitchen into a single satisfying plate rather than a recipe to be followed exactly.</p>
<h2 id="a-dish-that-travelled-and-a-namesake-that-didnt">A dish that travelled, and a namesake that didn’t</h2>
<p>Chop suey did not stay within American borders. Versions appear across the Chinese diaspora, in parts of Europe, the Caribbean and South Asia, each adapted to local ingredients in a fresh repeat of the original improvisation. In Indian Chinese cooking, a cuisine developed by the Hakka community of Kolkata, “chopsuey” is often a sweet-and-sour tangle of crisp-fried noodles, vegetables and a glossy sauce, sometimes crowned with a fried egg, a version a New Yorker of the 1920s would scarcely recognise. The dish keeps doing what it first did: arriving in a new place and quietly becoming something else. There is also a complete imposter to contend with. “American chop suey”, popular in New England, is an entirely separate dish of macaroni, ground beef and tomato sauce that shares nothing with the stir-fry but the name, a coincidence that has confused diners for a century; the same casserole is known as “American goulash” or simply “goulash” in other parts of the United States, borrowing yet another foreign name it has no real claim to. The way a single label can wander between two unrelated dishes is a small reminder of how loosely food names travel, a theme shared with other dishes whose identities shift by region, like the contested toppings and traditions surrounding <a href="/specialdate/us-national-guacamole-day/">US National Guacamole Day</a>.</p>
<h2 id="how-it-is-celebrated">How it is celebrated</h2>
<p>US National Chop Suey Day is observed in a warm and informal way, most often by simply eating the dish. Some mark it by visiting a local Chinese-American restaurant, especially the older, family-run kind that still keeps chop suey on the menu out of long habit rather than fashion. Others cook it at home, embracing its improvisational nature by raiding the vegetable drawer and using whatever protein is to hand, which is entirely in the spirit of how the dish was invented. A few use the date as a prompt to read a little about the history behind the plate, and about the contributions of Chinese immigrants to American food and the discrimination they cooked through. Sharing it at a table, in keeping with its communal character, is as fitting a way to honour it as any.</p>
<p>There is a melancholy footnote to the celebration: the classic chop suey house is fading. As later generations of diners learned to prize the regional Chinese cuisines, Sichuan, Hunan, Cantonese dim sum, that chop suey had helped make acceptable, the dish itself came to seem old-fashioned, a relic of an earlier, less adventurous palate. A day that puts it back on the table is partly an act of preservation, a refusal to let a genuinely historic dish quietly disappear from the menu.</p>
<h2 id="fun-facts">Fun facts</h2>
<ul>
<li>The Oxford English Dictionary’s first print citation of “chop suey” dates to 1888, fatally undermining the 1896 Li Hung Chang origin myth.</li>
<li>Edward Hopper’s <em>Chop Suey</em> sold at auction in November 2018 for 92 million dollars, a record for the artist at the time.</li>
<li>“American chop suey”, a macaroni-and-beef casserole from New England, has no ingredients in common with the Chinese-American stir-fry beyond its name.</li>
<li>The food historian Alan Davidson called chop suey’s tangle of origin stories “a prime example of culinary mythology”, the kind of fog that surrounds many popular foods.</li>
<li>By the 1920s a New York society columnist described chop suey as rivalling the sandwich and salad as the standard lunch of young office workers.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="a-closing-reflection">A closing reflection</h2>
<p>Chop suey is often dismissed as inauthentic, a watered-down imitation of “real” Chinese food. But that judgement misses what it actually is: a genuine and original product of migration, invented by people far from home with what they could find, for a country still learning to eat beyond its own borders. There is no truer cuisine than the one that gets made when the familiar ingredients run out. The dish is not a poor copy of something else; it is its own honest record of how cultures meet across a kitchen counter.</p>
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