The journey of chop suey, from Ming Dynasty to a once-fashionable Americanized dish

Chop suey was once a classic Chinese American dish enjoyed on December 25 — a day when most other restaurants were closed — by Jews and other non-Christians.

These days, we tend to think of chop suey as a mishmash of stir-fried ingredients that emerged from immigrant communities in the United States. But its roots run deep, says Miranda Brown, a professor of Chinese history at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She wrote a 2021 article called "The Hidden, Magnificent History of Chop Suey" for the website Atlas Obscura.

"It's a dish that is chopped offal," she says. "Lung, liver, tripe, kidneys."

Yes, originally chop suey was primarily made of organ meats. Brown is quick to note that offal is flavorful, rich in nutrients, and was enjoyed widely until a few generations ago, thanks, in part to industrial meat packaging processes.

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"It can be chewy, it can be buttery, it can be kind of rubbery," Brown says of offal's distinctive textures. "For some people, that's really kind of exciting. Bouncy!"

The origins of the dish itself bounces back hundreds of years, she says, to imperial China.

"We have references to chop suey in Ming Dynasty texts," she notes. "The Journey to the West, which is a famous novel [from the 16th century], has a reference to chop suey. You will find it on fancy banquet menus. A version of the dish was even eaten at the Qing court."

When Chinese immigrants to the U.S. in the mid-1800s wanted to impress local officials, Brown says, they held banquets similar to ones back home, with 300-course meals that would get written up in local newspapers, in articles marveling over delicacies such as Peking duck, chop suey and bird's nest soup.

"All the bling foods that were popular when you had to [build] a good relationship with a person who had a lot of say about your life," Brown says.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 restricted immigration heavily, but Chinese restaurants still spread rapidly across the United States. By the early 1900s, chop suey had become a cultural phenomenon, a beloved ambassador dish to what had been an unfamiliar cuisine to many Americans.

Louis Armstrong recorded a song in 1926 called "Cornet Chop Suey." The 1958 musical Flower Drum Song dedicated an entire number to it. And in the movie A Christmas Story, set in the 1940s and based on the writings of Jean Shepherd, a white, Midwestern, working-class family celebrates Christmas at a Chinese restaurant called the Bo Ling Chop Suey Palace.

"It was exotic," Brown says. "It involves a little bit of adventure, and it is a name that people can pronounce."

But by the late 20th century, chop suey had fallen out of fashion. Brown says she never saw it on menus in her home city of San Francisco in the 1980s, when she was growing up. By then, Americans had deepened their appreciation of Chinese food, thanks in large part to popular cookbook author, PBS host and restaurateur Cecilia Chiang.

Before she died in 2020 at the age of 100, Chiang told NPR she thought it was hilarious how so many Americans had believed that the contemporary versions of chop suey were authentic. "They think, oh, chop suey is the only thing we have in China," she said in a 2017 NPR interview. "What a shame!"

"I think for her, it had just evolved to the point where it was no longer recognizable," says Miranda Brown, whose own mixed heritage is half white, half Chinese. "Foods evolve. I always think, if I met my great-great-grandparents, would they recognize me? Would they see elements of their faces in mine or my daughter's? And I would guess not. Something similar happened with Chinese food in America. When a dish leaves, a hundred years later it has evolved, a lot."

And perhaps it's about time, Brown says, for chop suey's next evolution: to make a comeback.
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