There are a number of Chop Suey options on the menu–sticking as close as possible to Mom’s ideal version, I chose the beef and mushroom. Number One Chop Suey in Oak Forest is not our local go-to carryout for Chinese-American dishes–En Lai in Midlothian captured our loyalty shortly after we moved to this area and is a regular stop for us–but we’ve tried it before and found the service quick and friendly and the food hot and fresh. How would I know where to get the best, absolute top shelf chop suey to compete with my mom’s recipe? A quick search in Google Maps gave me the answer. Where to go, though? Chop suey isn’t a dish I’ve benchmarked. I brought that batch of chop suey home with me and ate it for a few more days until I ran out. The bottom bun got a little gummy from the sauce it absorbed, but not terribly so, maybe because it started out a little stiff and stale. I tore through this in mere moments, with the help of a fork, of course, since eating this out of hand appeared doomed to failure. It doesn’t seem to be out of bounds though for either the versions of chop suey I’ve seen at American-Chinese restaurants, or for the version in the tweet above, apart from the gravy’s color. Mom says she doesn’t recall her chop suey being this saucy when she’s made it previously, and believes that it may be a result of modifying the recipe to be gluten-free. Mom herself is on a gluten-free diet, and no longer regularly has daycare kids in the house, so I was lucky to find this only mildly stale bun, which was revived with a few seconds in the microwave. I started with a plain old hamburger bun, something I found abandoned in the recesses of Mom’s breadbox. I immediately tried it on a sandwich Hamburger bun It was an express trip to my childhood, something I hadn’t tasted for decades but recognized instantly. My mom’s chop suey uses Bead Molasses and it is delicious. Today, I am that beaming middle-aged white woman. The measurements I’ve put here are guesstimates, yet to be corroborated by mom.
Like many of mom’s recipes, this came to me entirely without measurements of any kind. Not only that, but every recipe I’ve seen call for this ingredient is a chop suey recipe, presented by a beaming middle-aged white woman who calls it “Mom’s Chop Suey.” What is Bead Molasses? My searches online tell me it is a “delicately sweet coloring syrup for Chinese recipes.” However, I have only found one brand referenced in every link: Dynasty brand sold in the US. It is seasoned not only with soy sauce (which may or may not be a part of the gravy in Salem), but also with Bead Molasses. Mom’s version uses a mixture of pork and beef chunks, and embellishes with sliced mushrooms, stir-fried with the same onions, celery, and mass of bean sprouts that appear to form the base of the Salem dish, along with a corn starch-thickened gravy.
When my mom heard I’d be tackling this sandwich this month, she spontaneously cooked up a batch for me. Now I grew up eating chop suey as well and it doesn’t look spectacularly different than what Ben Collins tweeted.
By the time the Chinese restaurateurs of Salem had developed this particular version of chop suey, the kind served with a hamburger bun in a styrofoam clamshell at the chop suey stand in Salem, the gravy might have changed color from its travels through the central states.
By the time the Chinese diaspora had made it here to Salem, Massachusetts, all the way across the country from their starting point of San Francisco, perhaps their chop suey had left behind the water chestnuts, bamboo shoots, or bell peppers it might have featured in parts of the Western US. But in essence it seems to have been a compromise dish, an application of Chinese techniques to mostly-familiar items and flavors.īased on Ben Collins’ photo, the chop suey of Salem appears to be a mass of bean sprouts and possibly a chunk or two of chicken, suspended in a viscous, mostly transparent gravy of some kind. There are a number of stories, mostly apocryphal, about the name “chop suey,” what it means, and how the dish originated. So what is chop suey? Is it truly a Chinese dish, or an invention of Chinese-American restaurants? The second act of the documentary film The Search for General Tso traces how the Chinese who’d immigrated to America spread east after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which severely limited not only further Chinese immigration but even the types of work they could do, essentially giving birth to the ubiquitous Chinese laundries and Chop Suey restaurants across the United States. wUBjRZAuOX- Ben Collins JSo what is Chop Suey? They’re called chop suey sandwiches and they only exist in Salem, Massachusetts. Every year on the 4th of July, everyone in my family eats one of these monstrosities.
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