Recently, while visiting Jacob’s grandmother in California, I discovered a torn cookbook in her kitchen drawers. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “You found my bible!”
Titled “Country Cookin’”, the book was published in the 1970s by the Monterey County Cowbelles, otherwise known as the wives of Monterey’s ranchers. Surprisingly, only a tenth of the book is devoted to red-meat-centric dishes. Most of the recipes are charmingly anachronistic, like Dove in Wine Sauce and Hot Russian Tea (with Tang!). But what really caught my attention were the handful of Chinese recipes.
Zooming past the egg foo young and sweet and sour beef, I zeroed in on chop suey. After all, it was the page with the most food stains, the telltale sign of a beloved recipe.
Chop suey, the emblematic dish of the America’s Chinese restaurants, is similar to the Cantonse “jap sui”, literally “odds and ends”. Which Chinese mother has not stir-fried every leftover bit in her kitchen with soy sauce? What developed in the US just had a thicker sauce, more standardized vegetables (onions and celery were a must), and fewer Mysterious Animal Parts. Later, some smart chef figured out that his customers loved anything crispy, and added fried noodles to the mix.
I did not grow up with American chop suey. By the late 1980s, it had dropped off most Chinese menus in the Northeast (though contemporaries like chow mein and pupu platters remained.) To my parents, La Choy products were as foreign as Twinkies. Until recently, I was not aware canned bean sprouts even existed.
“Why are you making chop suey?” Jacob asked a few days ago at Safeway. He looked tortured. He had, apparently, eaten the CowBelle chop suey too many times as a kid. “It’s not going to taste good.”
“Pessimist,” I retorted.
My curiosity got the better of me. I’ve had chop suey once or twice in restaurants, and have stir-fried my fair share of random leftover vegetables. But I had never put myself in the role of a 70′s-era housewife and made a fully-loaded chop suey casserole, with celery, onions, and Uncle Ben’s. Honestly, I thought. There must be something appealing about chop suey that inspired Sinclair Lewis to give it a recurring role in his novels, Edward Hopper to name a painting after it, and millions of baby boomers to gobble it up.
Now, I had always assumed that the gooey-ness of chop suey was due to too much corn starch. And maybe it was, in Chinese restaurants. But for chop suey casseroles, the CowBelles and many other American cooks used the versatile Cream of Chicken soup. And why not? It sinks into the rice and results in a creamy, fragrant casserole. In lieu of the regular white grain, I used Uncle Ben’s Original; the long baking time would have ruined instant rice.
The finished casserole tasted better than expected. My sausages lent enough flavor that I didn’t have to season the dish, and the rice absorbed the liquid well without becoming mushy. Best of all, the hour-long baking seemed to eliminate the preservative aftertaste I associate with Campbell’s soups.
As for The Pessimist, he took third helpings, leaving me with both an empty casserole dish and a self-satisfied grin.
Be warned, friends. If sauerkraut crosses my path soon, I will attempt Polish Chop Suey. Culinary experimentation is a dangerous thing.
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American Chop Suey
Adapted from Country Cookin’ by the Monterey County CowBelles, 1975 edition
Serves 4
2 medium onions, chopped
1 cup chopped celery
1/2 cup chopped green pepper
1 pound pork sausage, finely chopped, or ground beef
1 cup uncooked rice
1 can Cream of Chicken Soup
1/2 cup water
1/4 cup soy sauce
1 can bean sprouts*, or 1 cup fresh bean sprouts, chopped
1 can water chestnuts*, sliced
Salt and pepper to taste
6 ounces chow mein noodles
*Given the difficulty of finding water chestnuts or bean sprouts in ranch country, I used La Choy Chop Suey Canned Vegetables, which also has bits of onion and celery.
Preheat oven at 350 degrees.
Over medium-high heat, sauté onions, celery, and green pepper until just cooked but not yet brown. Add meat and cook for 1 minutes, until no longer red. Transfer to a casserole dish. Add rice.
In a separate bowl, mix together Cream of Chicken, water, soy sauce, bean sprouts, and water chestnuts. Pour half into the bottom of the dish, layer rice on top, and pour the rest of the mixture over the rice. Add meat and onion mixture on the top.
Bake for 1 hour.
Sprinkle chow mein noodles on top before serving.
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When Chinese Food was Glamorous in America
Remembrance of Kosher Chinese Past
I am so glad to hear that your chop suey casserole was worthy of multiple servings. Bravo! And woot for old school cook books.
I never made this dish…that I can remember..but perhaps your dad made it…hmmmmmmmmmmm…
Mom
I first read the title as “chop suey casserole with RANCH.” Now that would be interesting…
Is it the use of rice, waterchestnuts, and soy sauce that makes people think this is Chinese?
I recently bought a copy of the Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook from my library’s used bookstore. It was published in 1966. Haven’t scanned through it all yet, but got the impression that it was very much a white person’s interpretation of what they thought was Chinese food. The only reason it rang a bell was because I saw it mentioned on someone’s blog and they looked toward it as a resource. Ah, there’s much more authentic resources these days. I think cookbooks like these are such anachronisms, but people are still using them. Quaint?
I don’t see these cookbooks as accurate resources for Chinese food, but they are great windows into America’s interpretation of Chinese food in those decades. For example, that using rice, water chestnuts, and soy sauce automatically makes something Chinese. Or that every family, no matter how "white", seems to have their sweet and sour dish. It’s more a fun peek into history than anything else.
You stirred up a few people who seem upset about calling anything with rice and water chestnuts ‘Chinese’ food. Decades ago, when I first started exploring ‘real’ Chinese food, I learned that there were 8 schools of Chinese cuisine. These were the ‘old school’ Chinese cuisines. Since then, not only have I learned that the traditional recipes have been updated, modernized, fused with, whatever by modern Chinese chefs in Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong. Not only has modern Chinese food in China become less than traditional, but wherever Chinese people emigrated, they fused their food traditions with those in their new environments, e.g., Indochina, Singapore, Malasia, Indonesia, Europe and the Americas. American-Chinese food stands on its own as a distinctive subset of Chinese cuisine. The proof is in the way that General Tso’s Chicken, to name just one dish, has returned to mainland China. The Chinese food I enjoyed as a child in Brooklyn is as enjoyable to me today as the more “authentic” dishes such as mapau doufu. I have even observed that American-Chinese dishes differ according to whether they are Northeastern or California dishes. Try to find a New York egg roll in San Francisco or even in Los Angeles, much less anywhere else in the western U.S. Shrimp in Lobster Sauce, served in Califorrnia, more often includes fermented black beans in its preparation, while the same dish, prepared in old fashioned eastern chop suey houses, omits fermented black beans. Many more examples of differences can be found to persuade one that American-Chinese is made up of at least two cuisines.
Awesome!
i love that comment “you found my bible”!
I often seek out “Shredded Pork in Peking Sauce” when I eat in a Chinese restaurant. Last week, I asked if the cook at Hop Woo in West L.A. would prepare the dish for me. The waiter, taking my order, complained that the dish is too sweet. I insisted and when they prepared it and I tasted it, I found it to be equal to the best version I had ever tasted. It was just a delightful flavor, with just a slightly sweet edge to it. Also, in addition to the shredded bamboo shoots and shredded scallions that are traditional to the dish, the cook incorporated tiger lilies, giving it additional texture.
I strongly recommend Hop Woo as the best Chinese restaurant in the westside of Los Angeles. In addition to the pork in Peking sauce, I have tasted their West Lake beef soup, barbecued pork and pan-fried noodles, and spicy deep-fried chicken wings with salt and Sichuan pepper. All of these were outstanding examples of those dishes.
Bert – Um, is this a blatant advertisement for Hop Woo? I don’t see what it has to do with the above post.
I was not advertising Hop Woo. I was recommending Hop Woo as an example of fine authentic Chinese restaurant cooking on the westside of Los Angeles. The westside is sadly lacking in really fine Chinese restaurant cooking. I thought you would be interested that it at least exists at one restaurant. It is diffilcult, given the traffic in LA, for westsiders to get to the San Gabriel Valley to enjoy fine, authentic Chinese restaurant food. Hop Woo allows us to avoid navigating through heavy traffic for more than an hour on week nights.
My mom used to make this dish except she substituted 1 lb of large shrimp (chopped) and it was always a favorite.
Thanks!
Hilarious! And good for you for experimenting from such an old community cookbook.