Chop suey
| Chop suey | |||||||||||||
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| Traditional Chinese | |||||||||||||
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| Simplified Chinese | |||||||||||||
| Hanyu Pinyin | zá suì | ||||||||||||
| Cantonese Yale | jaahp seui | ||||||||||||
| Literal meaning | odds and ends assorted pieces |
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| Transcriptions | |
|---|---|
| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | zá suì |
| Yue: Cantonese | |
| Yale Romanization | jaahp seui |
| Jyutping | zaap6seoi3 |
Chop suey (/ˈtʃɒpˈsuːi/) is a dish in American Chinese cuisine and other forms of overseas Chinese cuisine, consisting of meat (often chicken, fish, beef, prawns, or pork) and eggs, cooked quickly with vegetables such as bean sprouts, cabbage, and celery and bound in a starch-thickened sauce. It is typically served with rice but can become the Chinese-American form of chow mein with the addition of stir-fried noodles.
Chop suey has become a prominent part of American Chinese cuisine, Filipino cuisine, Canadian Chinese cuisine, German Chinese cuisine, Indian Chinese cuisine, and Polynesian cuisine. In Chinese Indonesian cuisine it is known as cap cai (雜菜, "mixed vegetables") and mainly consists of vegetables.
Chop suey is widely believed to have been invented in America by Chinese Americans, but the anthropologist E. N. Anderson concludes that the dish is based on tsap seui (杂碎, “miscellaneous leftovers”), common in Taishan (Toisan), a county in Guangdong province, the home of many early Chinese immigrants to the U.S. This "became the infamous 'chop suey' of third-string Chinese restaurants in the western world, but it began life as a good if humble dish among the specialist vegetable farmers of the area. At the end of the day, they would stir-fry the small shoots, thinnings, and unsold vegetables—up to ten species in a dish!" The Hong Kong doctor Li Shu-fan likewise reported that he knew it in Toisan in the 1890s.
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Wikipedia