Chop Suey : A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States (21 page)

Wong Ching Foo’s article appeared at a very particular time in the history of Gotham: the middle of the Gilded Age, when the city was awash with money. The newspapers were filled with articles about the lavish homes and outrageous parties of millionaire families like the Vanderbilts, Goulds, and Astors. On Fifth Avenue, old and nouveau riche wealth fought for status against a background of constantly shifting social mores. Those who had “arrived” in high society attempted to keep the socially ambitious out of it by deploying the weapons of snobbery and exclusion. Social arbiters like Ward McAllister limited the elite to four hundred, the number of people who would fit into Mrs. Astor’s ballroom, and devised a series of elaborate rules for their behavior. According to McAllister, no expenditures were too great when it came to entertaining, including on the food one provided. The dishes at a dinner party must be classic French
cuisine, so the family’s chef must of course be French as well. In 1890, McAllister wrote: “twenty years ago there were not over three
chefs
in private families in this city. It is now the exception not to find a man of fashion keeping a first-class
chef
or a famous
cordon bleu
.”
¹⁰
In preparing for a dinner, the hostess must have a detailed knowledge of French cuisine in order to inspire her temperamental chef to new heights and to decide whether he should follow the truffled
filet
, served with black sauce, with a
riz de veau à la Toulouse
or a
supreme de volaille
with white sauce. If her own dining room wasn’t large enough, she would turn to one of the city’s palatial restaurants, Delmonico’s on Madison Square above all, where she would negotiate the menu with Mr. Delmonico or his famous chef, Charles Ranhofer. If her taste proved correctly exquisite—and if enough money reached the right society columnists and editors—then all New York would recognize and reaffirm her status at the top of the social heap. In this world, encompassing not only socialites but jewelers, florists, dressmakers, and journalists like the “fashionable magazinist” in Edwin H. Trafton’s party, there was a right way and a wrong way to comport oneself. You could dine in Chinatown once, and laugh about it over cigars and drinks at the Astor House afterward, but you could not make a habit of it.

However culturally influential the elite were (or thought they were), not all of New York strove to copy their ways. Another group arose that seemed to take pleasure in flouting every rule McAllister’s four hundred held dear. They called themselves Bohemians—a name taken from Henri Murger’s story “La Vie de Bohème,” set in the Latin Quarter of 1840s Paris. Murger’s characters were free-spirited but starving artists; the Bohemians of late nineteenth-century New York were free-spirited but frequently well-fed artists and writers. In fact, one way American Bohemians defined themselves
was by where they ate. If Mrs. Astor dined at Delmonico’s, they chose dark and dingy restaurants down in the immigrant districts where the food was cheap and the clientele disreputable; they were the first “underground gourmets” and “chowhounds.” During the 1850s, the favorite haunt of the first generation of city Bohemians (including Walt Whitman) was Pfaff’s saloon, a German beer cellar below the sidewalk at Broadway near Bleecker Street, where they drank, talked, sang, caroused, and made love. Twenty years later, a new generation of writers and artists rendezvoused at eateries like the Grand Vatel and the villainous Taverne Alsacienne in the “French Quarter,” south of Washington Square. At the former, one could order a filling and “not unpalatable” three-course dinner, along with wine, coffee, and a roll, for a mere 50 cents. The purpose of these Bohemian visits to the immigrant restaurants was not just to enjoy cheap food and the company of fellow artists but also to be transported into a milieu that more accurately reflected the true nature of the city than all the Fifth Avenue ballrooms. So when a little community of Chinese appeared along lower Mott Street in the late 1870s, it became a natural destination for Bohemians. With (relatively) open minds, hungry stomachs, and a metaphoric thumb in the eye of the four hundred, they led the charge across the boundaries of taste.

The journalist and editor Allan Forman was tutored in the delights of Chinese food by a friend, a “jolly New York lawyer of decidedly Bohemian tendencies, who one day suggested, ‘Come and dine with me.’” “Where?” Forman asked, knowing the lawyer’s taste for reveling in “dirt and mystery and strange viands” down in the immigrant district.

“Oh, over at Mong Sing Wah’s, 18 Mott street. He is a Celestial Delmonico,” was the reply.

“Thanks awfully. But my palate is not educated up to rats and dogs yet. Let me take a course in some French
restaurant where these things are disguised before I brave them in their native honesty,” I answered.

“I’m surprised to find this prejudice in you,” he exclaimed, rather petulantly. “A Chinese dinner is as clean as an American dinner, only far better. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You come with me to Mong Sing Wah’s tonight and I’ll show you his kitchen. If it is not as clean as that Italian place where you eat spaghetti I’ll pay for the best dinner for two you can order at Delmonico’s.”
¹¹

So on a bitterly cold night early in 1886, the two white men took the Third Avenue streetcar down to Chatham Square and Mong Sing Wah’s restaurant, hidden in a courtyard behind 18 Mott. The lawyer surprised Forman by greeting the owner and then ordering dinner in apparently fluent Chinese: “‘Chow-chop-suey, chop-seow, laonraan, san-sui-goy, no-ma-das,’ glibly ordered my friend, and the white-robed attendant trotted off and began to chant down a dumbwaiter.” This dinner was not a banquet of rare ingredients imported from China but a meal off the menu—the everyday restaurant food eaten by New York’s Chinese. When the food appeared, Forman seemed to forget his fears about rats and dogs:

Chow-chop suey was the first dish we attacked. It is a toothsome stew, composed of bean sprouts, chicken’s gizzards and livers, calfe’s tripe, dragon fish, dried and imported from China, pork, chicken, and various other ingredients which I was unable to make out. Notwithstanding its mysterious nature, it is very good and has formed the basis of many a good Chinese dinner I have since eaten. Chopseow is perfumed roast pork. The pork is roasted and then hung in the smoke of various aromatic herbs which gives it a most delicious flavor. It is cut into small pieces, as indeed
is everything at a Chinese restaurant, that it may be readily handled with the chop sticks. No bread is served with a Chinese dinner, but its place is taken by boiled rice, or fan as it is called in Chinese. A couple of bowls of rice is [laonraan], the F being dropped when the number is prefixed, and such rice, white, light, snowy; each grain thoroughly cooked yet separate. Fish is delightfully cooked, baked in a sort of brown sauce, and masquerades under the name of san-sui-goy.

Forman and his friend washed the food down with tea and little cups of “no-ma-das,” a Chinese rice liquor. At the end of the dinner, Forman was shocked to realize that he had wholeheartedly enjoyed it: “The meal was not only novel, but it was good, and to cap the climax the bill was only sixty-three cents!”
¹²
For almost the next century, that would sum up the main attractions of Chinese food for Americans: tasty, exotic, and cheap.

In the 1880s, untold numbers of non-Chinese New Yorkers trekked to Chinatown to eat. In 1885, Wong Ching Foo claimed that thousands of New Yorkers had already tried “oriental” dining; three years later, he declared that at least “five hundred Americans take their meals regularly in Chinese restaurants.”
¹³
Almost all of these were situated on the block of Mott Street between Chatham Square and Pell Street. Wong identified Yu-ung-Fang-Lau at 14 Mott as the only high-class restaurant, the favorite of “Canton importers, Hong Kong merchants, Mongolian visitors from Frisco, flush gamblers, and wealthy laundrymen.”
¹⁴
The half dozen or so other eateries catered to all the rest of the Chinese: servants, cooks, cigar makers, and most of all laundrymen from the poor Sze Yap district of the Pearl River Delta. Very few of them had wives, so during the week they prepared simple meals (rice with a little meat or vegetable) in their workplaces or rooming houses. On Sundays they came to
Chinatown to shop, socialize, catch up on the news, and have a meal in a restaurant. If they could afford it, they liked to splurge on pricey imported delicacies from the top end of the menu. The Bohemians and other non-Chinese did the opposite: “Many of these Americans have acquired Chinese gastronomical tastes, and order dishes like Chinese mandarins; but as a rule the keepers do not cater to any other trade than Chinese, because the Chinaman frequently orders two-dollar and three-dollar dishes, while the American seldom pays more than fifty or seventy-five cents for his Chinese dinner.”
¹⁵
Out of the array of dishes the Americans preferred, the earthy mixed stir-fry called “chow chop suey” stood out as their favorite. “Chop suey” is more accurately transcribed as “za sui” (Mandarin) or “shap sui” (Cantonese). “Shap” means mixed or blended together; “sui” means bits or small fragments. Read together, the most common translation is “odds and ends.” As a culinary term, “shap sui” refers to a hodgepodge stew of many different ingredients; when this dish is “chow,” that means it’s fried. You could call it a stir-fried Chinese hash.

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. 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. Yet in nineteenth-century New York, the definition of chop suey was anything but fixed. Most early descriptions tell of chicken livers and gizzards, or perhaps duck giblets, stir-fried with tripe, bean sprouts, “fungi” (probably wood ears), celery, dried fish, and whatever else the cook felt inspired to add, including spices and “seow” (soy sauce). Wong Ching Foo and other reporters describe chop suey as the staple food of the New York
Chinese and even the “national dish of China.” In 1893, now an expert on the subject, Allan Forman wrote: “
Chow chop suey
is to the Chinaman what the
olla podrida
is to the Spaniard, or pork and beans to our own Bostonians.”
¹⁶
Considering the vast, ancient, and complicated tradition of Chinese cuisine, this clearly was not true. But if Forman had only been exposed to Chinese from the Pearl River Delta, then he may have been correct in noting their preference for chop suey. In any case, there’s little doubt that this dish—in its manifestation as a stir-fried organ meat and vegetable medley—originated in the Sze Yap area around Toishan. Decades later, a distinguished Hong Kong surgeon named Li Shu-Fan reminisced about a childhood visit to Toishan, which was his ancestral home:

I first tasted chop suey in a restaurant in Toishan in 1894, but the preparation had been familiar in that city long before my time. The recipe was probably taken to America by Toishan people, who, as I have said, are great travelers. Chinese from places as near to Toishan as Canton and Hong Kong are unaware that chop suey is truly a Chinese dish, and not an American adaptation.
¹⁷

Now launched on a slow but sure path to acceptance, Chinese food, and in particular chop suey, was poised to become a national fad. In the spring of 1896, New Yorkers learned that one of China’s most powerful statesmen, the de facto foreign minister, would be visiting their city that year. American China watchers considered Li Hongzhang, the viceroy of Zhili (the provinces around Beijing), as China’s best hope for strengthening and modernizing China. The purpose of Li’s visit was to shore up relations with the United States and to protest the unfairness of the Exclusion Act as well as the mistreatment of Chinese
immigrants. (This might, in turn, shore up his reputation at home, then under a cloud due to the recent humiliation his force had suffered at the hands of the Japanese navy.) In late August, he arrived in New York harbor aboard the steamship
St. Louis
. From Chinatown to Fifth Avenue, all of New York was agog at this elderly and somewhat frail man, wearing a magnificent yellow silk jacket. A troop of cavalry escorted him from the pier up to the Waldorf Hotel, at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-third Street, where he was installed in the royal suite. Every step of the way, teams of reporters from the city’s many competing newspapers recorded his actions.

On Mott Street, at Delmonico’s, and in the Waldorf kitchens, phalanxes of chefs made preparations to feast the famous visitor. Meanwhile, anxious to pick up any scrap of color to entertain its readers, William Randolph Hearst’s
New York Journal
planted reporters in the Waldorf’s kitchen to record every move of Li’s four chefs, who had traveled with him from China. A sketch artist drew them at work, depicting their tools and the lacquer tray that was used to carry the viceroy’s food up to his suite. At public events, journalists watched every morsel of food that passed Li’s lips—or at least some of them did. The
Times
reporters at the Waldorf banquet in Li’s honor wrote that he ate sparingly from the classic French menu but dove in when a servant brought his Chinese food: “It consisted of three dishes. There was boiled chicken cut up in small square pieces, a bowl of rice, and a bowl of vegetable soup.”
¹⁸
This was the food of either an invalid or a gourmet in the spirit of Yuan Mei. The
Washington Post
reported of the exact same event: “At the table he barely nibbled the delicate dishes before him, and would not touch the wines. This was noticed by his hosts, and in a few moments chop suey and chop sticks were placed before him, and he ate with relish.”
¹⁹
According to the
Journal
’s careful accounting, Li never ate chop suey during his New York stay, but many other newspapers and the wire services that sent articles across the country repeated the news that he had done so—simply because chop suey, the only Chinese dish most white Americans had tasted, had become emblematic of Chinese food as a whole. (The Chinese diplomats reading those accounts must have been shocked by the idea that a high official from Beijing would stoop to the level of Pearl River Delta peasant food.)