In 1886, journalist Allan Forman recalled a splendid meal taken in New York’s Mong Sing Wah, a place he called a “Celestial Delmonico’s”-a label that compared the Chinese restaurant favorably to the era’s leading fine-dining establishment. What’s inside a can of La Choy Vegetable Chop Suey? Bean sprouts, celery, water, salt, water chestnuts, onion, carrots, bamboo shoots, sugar, red bell peppers, monosodium glutamate, dehydrated garlic, ascorbic acid (“to protect color”), citric acid, and “flavor.” Amanda Perez for Gastro Obscuraīut chop suey arrived in the United States in the mid-19th century to much acclaim. Then pour in soy sauce and voilà, you have a quick weeknight meal composed of soggy bean sprouts, soft water chestnuts, and faded pink bell peppers. To prepare it, heat up a pan, add oil, meat slivers, and sauce-covered vegetables from a tin. Nowadays, most chop suey ingredients come straight from a can. Historian Andrew Coe, author of Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States, characterizes the dish as a “brownish, overcooked stew, strangely flavorless, with no redeeming qualities, and redolent of bad school cafeterias and dingy, failing Chinese restaurants.”Ĭoe is on the mark about many American incarnations of the dish. For decades, scholars and foodies have heaped scorn on it. Most people in the English-speaking world know chop suey as a vintage Chinese American dish. Today, we might think this humble dish was out of place on his table. For the occasion, he ordered his cooks to prepare some of the most scrumptious delicacies that money could buy, such as edible bird’s nest, shark fin soup, lake crab, sea cucumber, roast duck, and suckling pig. Tong’s dinner was a study in conspicuous consumption, with hundreds of dishes. The meal was opulent, even by the standards of the city, whose inhabitants were notorious, as contemporaries quipped, for “throwing money around like dirt and dung.” The event took place in Tong’s luxurious quarters in Yangzhou, a metropolis 170 miles north of Shanghai. Sometime in the late 18th century, a wealthy salt merchant named Tong Yuejin decided to throw a banquet.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |