Chop Suey

Remember when we were young and clever, we delighted in telling people in worldly tones that Chop Suey wasn't actually Chinese food, that it was instead invented in San Francisco by a Chinese cook who was asked to throw together a meal out of leftovers after hours? Well, guess what, the joke's on us, and now we have to track down all those dinner party companions over the years and tell them that we were parroting a popular myth without doing any fact checking.

Chop Suey comes from the Cantonese "tsap seui", which means mixed scraps. It comes from Toisan, a district south of Canton, in China, where it combined leftover vegetables chopped up and fried up with noodles. It was brought over to America by Chinese workers. The American addition was probably the addition of meat: the very poor in China probably would have rarely had meat seating around as a leftover item.

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