Folks, celebrated food writer and author Molly O'Neill is wrapping up the manuscript for One Big Table: A portrait of America at the Table (Simon and Schuster, forthcoming). One Big Table looks to be a fantastic a collection of 1,000 recipes from home cooks all over the United States. Molly has been working on this project for about 10 years, traversing the country to obtain recipes and personal stories. Molly's research assistant, Val Rogers, is in need of recipes for the following:
- Vietnamese Lemon Grass
Chicken - Hawaiian Chicken*
- Cantonese Grilled Chicken *
- Chicken Chow Mein
- Khoresht Fesenjan [This is from Iran/Persia, which is technically part of Asia, okay?]
- Original Chop
Suey
The RULES for submission
The
"home cook" cannot be a food professional (chef/food
writer/historian/
But the family or friends of food professionals are fine, as are
"amateur food bloggers." This means a number of you reading this posting! No professional bloggers please.
How to submit recipes
The home cook
can email
a recipe to Val Rodgers at valerierodgers@
Val can also
take the recipe over the phone, if that's easier for the cook, who may not really use a recipe. In either
case, Val would need to do a ten minute interview with the cook, to add
some
context for the recipe and how it fits into the cook's life and
experiences. No compensation is available and the
deadlines are soon!
This promises to be a historic publication and perhaps you'll be part of it!
Joel says
Hi Andrea, I'm not sure if I can help with the recipes for Cantonese grilled chicken and chop suey. I have no idea what Cantonese grilled chicken is - if it is the traditional Cantonese crispy fried chicken but adapted to US contexts I have the recipe for the original fried chicken.
Chop suey is another one. I have a book (in Chinese) of a now deceased Chinese food critic who worked in HK in the 1930s to 1960s as editor for various newspapers such as Sing Tao Daily, and then spent the remainder of his years in San Francisco. He discussed chop suey's recipe as a bit like sweet and sour pork but with more ingradients and may vary from pork. HK-based foodie Willie Mak believes chop suey as done in Chinese restaurants in Britain is more akin to something like fried beansprouts and with some sauces (red or white).
I suspect chop suey is a series of radically different dishes with identical names depending on the location of the overseas Chinese community. The dish has disappeared from Australian kitchen from the 1990s onwards as the mainstream Australian dining scene started to become partly-Western partly-Asian in the quest for "Asian identity" (Australian celebrity cook Iain Hewitson claims the Chinese food in New Orleans, for example, is akin to what you would find in Australian state capital cities back in the 1950s, presumably Hewitson means the city itself rather than suburban parts), and in NZ we have sweet and sour pork but chop suey has likewise disappeared from the menus.
Andrea Nguyen says
Yep, nailing down the 'original' chop suey is a tough job as it seems just like you say -- people putting whatever they feel like into a dish. What a fascinating book you have of the Chinese food critic. What was his name? I wonder if he continued similar work in San Francisco? I bet I could find people who knew him. So cool.
I don't think I've ever had chop suey, nor seen it on a menu. I just looked through my Chinese cookbook collection and very few mention the dish, and when they do, it's not complimentary. I've not even seen a recipe for it. My works date back several decades.
As for the Cantonese grilled chicken, I was thinking that it may be a char siu chicken kind of thing. But who knows?
Joel says
Hi Andrea, the author's real name was Chan Mung-yan but he was almost universally known by his pen name, Special Textual Editor (te ji jiao dui in Mandarin transliteration, or dak kap gau dui in Cantonese transliteration). Even though he passed away in 1997, I believe there are still lots of people know who he is or even know him personally among the Chinese-American community in the Bay Area today. He is considered the first generation modern age Chinese food pundit hailing from Hong Kong.
The description about chop suey appeared in the preface of his out of print work "History of Cantonese Cuisine" (Mandarin: Yue cai sa yuan lu, ISBN 962-355130-4) published in Hong Kong by Food and Drink World Publications Ltd, part of the Wan Li Group in 1988. I stand corrected that a more detailed re-reading of the book reveals the author meant chop suey to be a series of Americanized Chinese dishes that included sweet and sour pork, char siu/char siew, and dishes with water chestnut and bamboo shoots.
I think in that case, the book probably uses chop suey as most Chinese in Asia: a semi-derogatory term describing Americanized Chinese food that are probably as far from their origins as spaghetti with meatballs from "Italian" Italian cooking.
Given this, perhaps there is indeed a dish named chop suey made with beansprouts and other misc vegetables. It is a shame that there is no commonly recognized origin of chop suey - Chinese in Britain didn't have much contacts with the Chinese in America back in the 19th century, and chop suey seemed to have developed among the two communities independent of each other. And even the origin of chop suey in America remains pretty poorly researched and I would say, very disputed.
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marlon says
I suspect chop suey is a series of radically different dishes with identical names depending on the location of the overseas Chinese community.