Customer Reviews

Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States

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I have to admit that from the cover I expected a fluffy but entertaining book in the style of _Eat My Globe_ but I actually got a lot more than that. This is a fact dense book, well researched.

The book opens with the new country of America sending its first ambassador (actually a merchant, which is very apropos on both sides) to China. It then diverges into a brief history of Chinese food in China - and Coe does a marvelous job of editing here, considering it's over 10,000 years of history and at least four major regions, each with their own sub-regions with their own culinary traditions.

Then back to the US, where Chinese restaurants arrived in the 1850s to feed all the Chinese people who'd come over looking for the mountains of gold. Americans never really developed a taste for the food till the 1900s, at which point it had become bland and homogenized enough to appeal to our whitebread tastes. Finally we go through the Jewish-Chinese food boom, the revitalization after WW2, Nixon's re-opening of China, and the state we're in today. The book ends with the happy yet sad state of affairs that you can get real Chinese food in the US if you know where to look, but most of it is still neutered to what we find acceptable - but we do that to all cuisines.

Unfortunately the history of Chinese people in the US is also the history of racism, so you will feel very uncomfortable about some of the quoted newspaper articles and accounts which are sprinkled with racial slurs and provincial attitudes - and not just about Chinese. Coe commendably reprints these without any squeamishness, as they're crucial to understanding American attitudes towards China.

Since the facts are so dense and interesting on their own, Coe doesn't really try to spice them up or breathlessly embroider them. The humor is very dry and low key - such as the tale of the socialite who scandalized society by her night trips to Chinatown to satiate her forbidden lust for... noodles. This means that if you're looking for something like _Kitchen Confidential_ you won't find it here. This makes it more informative, but if you need the stream of information rationed out and tarted up you'll be bored.

You'll find several bits of Chinese food trivia (and misinformation) covered here, such as where General Tso's chicken came from, the persistent notion that Chinese will eat anything (yes but no), and as promised by the title page, the history of Chop Suey.

All in all, I liked it quite a bit and blew threw it in two nights. This was much denser than I expected - it obviously skips a lot of detail in places, but it still ends up at 320 pages of fascinating overview with selected digressions, and he does give you a list of references if you're hungry for more.

I have often been told that if you have not traveled to China, then (as an American) you have never eaten Chinese food. I expected Chop Suey to be a foodie book about the evolution of the way food is prepared in China to the way it is served in our Chinese eateries. Chop Suey bills itself as "A Cultural History Of Chinese Food In The United States". It's really more of a history of how America has viewed the Chinese. It is not until a hundred pages or so in that the details of Chinese cuisine come into play. Prior to that, the book is a history of the China / American trade and a limited look at propaganda produced from those early voyages. There is a report here or there about the Americans being offered a meal they could not appreciate, but the primary focus is on the bigotry between the two.

From that point Chop Suey moves into the exploitation of early Chinese immigrants, the extreme racism they faced, and how they tried to hold on to their culture and cuisine in the face of it. Along the way many found jobs as cooks or opened fast food counters trying to prepare a food that met the expectations and tastes of their customers. Since those expectations were rooted in post colonial bias, the food that resulted bore little relation to what the Chinese ate at home. Moving into kosher Chinese food and eventually to Nixon's visit to China, Chop Suey continues to be a history of Chinese American relations with food as the tie and excuse for the journey. The murder of a young woman has little bearing on Chinese food as we know it, but such side trips relate to what seems to have been the author's real intention, exposing how racism kept our palates from a true cultural exchange.

There is a wealth of information in Chop Suey. The flaw of the book is that it doesn't match one's expectations. After those expectations are adjusted, it's a somewhat disjointed bundle of information without an overriding point of view to carry the reader along. It's like listening to someone go on at length about a topic they've studied in depth and become and expert on without them engaging your interest as well. This is a heavier read than it appears, and likely to thrill those who want to take a quick course in the topic while losing those just looking for a weekend jaunt.

There are two groups of people I can see wanting to read this book: people interested in history, and people interested in food. This book is a great niche resource for historians or history lovers and a good read for foodies.

The history side of the book is great because the author manages the difficult trick of presenting richly detailed history in a way that's accessible to a normal reader --- the author has very clearly done his research, and he presents an immense number of excerpts from first-hand accounts of meals eaten by everyone from 1800's San Francisco workmen to Jazz Age New York socialites "slumming it" in Chinatown. (My personal favorite was his account of a 1950's-era _Mad Magazine_ comic strip on dinner in a chinese restaurant that I could dimly remember reading myself as a child). It never gets dry or boring, though, perhaps because food is so inextricably tied into so many other issues -- culture, race, class; immigration, poverty, and the changing of social mores over time -- and the author does a great job of tying all those things into the tale. When he describes the plight of a hostess in Sinclair Lewis' 1920 novel _Main Street_ who throws a chinese-themed party that none of the guests in her rural Minnesota town can appreciate, or the development of Nixon's love for chinese food (from secretly packing pepperidge farm bread and frozen hamburgers onto Air Force One during his China visit, to later frequently patronizing select New York chinese restaurants), the reader gets an excellent picture of how America gradually came to accept and appreciate chinese food.

The author doesn't just spout an excess of facts; he expertly uses his extensive background research to effectively tell his story. As history, and as cultural history, this book is almost impeccable.

As a food book, it's also pretty good, but it's less compelling, primarily because it includes almost no recipes at all. The author will spend a whole chapter talking about Chop Suey, for example, from its origins to modern versions, but the closest thing to a recipe in the whole chapter was an excerpt from a 1920's _New York Home Journal_ article. Similarly, I was immensely interested to find out the true history of General Tso's Chicken, but I would have liked something closer to a detailed recipe than the quick description provided ("dark meat chicken marinated in egg whites and soy sauce . . . quickly deep fried, [then] stir-fried with ginger, garlic, soy sauce, vinegar, cornstarch, sesame oil, and dried chili peppers.") Give me proportions and times and temperatures! If I've read a whole book on the history of chinese food, there's decent odds I'd want to try replicating some historical recipes myself; the failure to include more detailed, complete recipes strikes me as a missed opportunity.

All in all, this is a neat read, and I'd strongly recommend it to both the lover of cultural history and the lover of food; but moreso to the former than to the latter.

"Chop Suey' is a delightful read, deceptively simple yet full of fascinating facts about the history of China and the USA. It draws you in immediately and fills your mind with the color and exotic smells that the first American merchants found in China, and continues to the Nixon visit and the 2009 Olympics. The detailed reports and insights into both cultures in the past and present are very interesting in their polar extreme differences, not just in food! It makes no pretense of being the ultimate guide of the cultures through history, but instead presents a "tip of the iceberg" view, thereby encouraging the reader to discover more about our united history. My only complaint is that after the detailed specifics in the beginning of the book, the latter chapters rush past with much less information.
A word of warning. Just go ahead and order Chinese before you curl up with this book, or be prepared to make a quick trip out for some! This slim volume would be a great addition to gift baskets with a Chinese food theme!

This book is a dream come true for anyone who loves to explore unusual byroads in history. I had expected, given the title, to read something cute with a lot of fun recipes. Instead I got a wonderful, well researched (an 11-page bibliography!) examination of the history of American contact with China and the resulting impact on the American diet.

The book opens in 1784, with the first American ship sailing to China for trade. Because foreigners were limited to an area without contact with the general population, you don't see a lot of early socializing. Still, there are a few early accounts of opinions about Chinese food. It is fun to read descriptions from people who have never imagined (and were unable to appreciate) such food.

The book continues through the immigration of Chinese to the USA, the creation of that very American institution, the Chinese family restaurant, the origins of Chop Suey, and gives us lots and lots of interesting social history along the way. I was unaware that Chinese people couldn't become US citizens for a long part of our history. Yet, the Chinese have been here, contributing to the creation of the USA for a long time. I suppose I should be saddened, but instead find it hilarious, that for a time Chinese restaurants were rumored to be dangerous to young ladies (who knew what might be upstairs! Opium! Other iniquities that would ruin a girl forever!). Since I mostly grew up in San Francisco and Hawaii, where there was a large population of Chinese in the antique days when I was young, I guess I missed hearing about that kind of discrimination. Eating at least twice a month at our favorite (The Empress of China!), I never dreamed that only a short time previously these menus would have been incredibly exotic.

Probably not everyone is that interested in the food, chop suey. But this book is interesting in ways that go far beyond food. This is a fun book, which I recommend very highly.

This book is an interesting history book, that uses the focus of Chinese food as a way to trace American interaction with Chinese culture from the first traders in 1784, through the Gold Rush immigrant influx, to Nixon's visit to China and beyond. It provides a good mix of information about Chinese cuisine, as well as how Americans interacted with and viewed Chinese cuisine and the Chinese, from extreme prejudice to broader acceptance to cultural mainstreaming.

The book extends further to trace the history of Chinese food in China, covering how grains and grain processing influenced different regions, as well as the impact of the vast Chinese geography on cuisine, such as the evolution of flour and how that spawned dim sum and noodle dishes, various cooking styles, and more.

It is an easy and fast read, well written, that mixes cuisine history with the good and the bad of American interaction with Chinese cuisine.

My only complaints about the book are that the ending is somewhat abrupt and I would have liked more pictures. And, it made me hungry.

Those interested in purchasing Andrew Coe's "Chop Suey" would do well to note its subtitle: "A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States." This is a work of scholarship, a concise, clearly written account of how Americans first travelled to China (as traders and missionaries), and how we as a society came, gradually, to import and embrace Chinese cuisine. Those looking for kitschy anecdotes and recipes should go elsewhere; this is not a Ming Tsai cookbook. That said, I thought "Chop Suey" was terrific social anthropology, full of highly entertaining detail and characters. And I learned a lot. I did feel that a little too much time was spent on Nixon's trip to China, and Coe stumbles embarrassingly in his attempts to explain why the Jews have such an affinity for Chinese food. But these are minor quibbles.

If you're interested in the history behind General Tso's chicken, I think you'll enjoy "Chop Suey" quite a bit; if you want to know how to make it, move on.

I have to say, as a folklorist and gourmand, I really enjoyed this book. I've always kind of taken Chinese Food for granted, preferring Thai, Japanese, Vietnamese and even Nepalese to Chinese. When I had a chance to read and review this book though, I jumped at it, as it was a great opportunity to learn more about the evolution of an Americanization of food culture.

Although the book can be a bit dry and wooden at times, there is an amazing amount of detail shown tot he history of Chinese food...as long as you're interested in learning about American's first encounters with Chinese Food on Chinese soil. The book is 251 pages long, not counting the photo index, bibliography and general index. However, it is only around page 103 (Chapter 4) where we get to Chinese immigrants landing on American soil. It's not until around page 145 we actually get to "Chinese Food in the United States." Then we have 100 pages to cover 150 years of how Chinese food evolved from what you would actually eat in one of China's many provinces to what we are served here. The actual portion of the book that covers the premise of the book is rushed and things will some times leap several years of decades without any coverage where the "Americans in China" beginning of the book covers details to a meticulous level. This huge shift in writing style and detailed coverage is immediately apparant and even a little jarring. I mean, I wanted to see how classic Chinese dishes evolved or changed to suit the American pallete and what the Chinese felt about these changes compared to the original versions of the dishes still served across the Pacific. However, only two dishes were looked at with any real substance: Chop Suey, which is archaic and nearly non-existant to begin with, and Peking Duck, which does deserve coverage although this dish is more popular with European Chinese Food than American.

Don't get me wrong: I really enjoyed this book - it's just that I was hoping for more time and substance being spent on Chinese Food in the United States but the focus for half the book was "Early American traders in China and what they ate." Both sections really should have been expanded and given their own book. Instead the entire premise of the book is the second half of the read and feels almost like an afterthought, especially when the book spend only a few sentences or paragraphs bast the 1980's, which is a shame because Ming Tsai and his "East Meets West" fusion dishes and the food culture that sprang from places like Tsai's Blue Ginger and Philadelphia's Susanna Foo deserved a great deal of coverage but instead both got a single sentence.

A decent read, but much like the old adage about Chinese Food, a true historian or gourmet will be left hungry due to the lack of fleshed out coverage and substance on the actual subject matter one expects from the title.

Somewhere, deep in the heart of middle America, there are still people who think that chop suey (and its cousin, chow mein) are Chinese food. But us sophisticated Bohemian types know better - chop suey is an American invention, bearing no resemblance to the stuff they actually eat in China.

Nope. We're both wrong.

This book, true to its name, traces the history of chop suey, from its roots in rural China, to the mining camps of 19th century California, to the back alleys of New York's Chinatown, all the way to those greasy spoon Chinese restaurants in middle American food courts and strip malls. Along the way, it gives us a history of Chinese-European commerce, an overview of American immigration policy, and a glimpse of everything from the Dutch East India Company in Shanghai to Kissinger and Nixon in Beijing (yes, you know that Nixon went to China. But do you know what he ate?).

The book is clearly a labor of love. The detail is admirable, but, instead of a dry academic tome, the prose is lively and engaging. There are a few tiny flaws - the author misses the mark slightly on "Safe Treif" (see From Lokshen to Lo Mein: The Jewish Love Affair with Chinese Food), and doesn't make any mention of Desi Chinese (a staple of Silicon Valley's Indian restaurants). These bits are minor, however. You will be drawn in to the story, and come out sated and refreshed.

Both foodies and historians will enjoy and appreciate this book.

I expected a light, entertaining read about the history of Americans eating Chinese food; instead this was a dense, informative read. Beginning with the first American trip to China in 1784 and ending roughly with the Nixon-era exchanges of the 1970s, author Coe surveys and explains the experience of eating Chinese food in this country using interesting anecdotes and LOTS of information. There are some pictures, of restaurants, menus and people; all of them are interesting and I wish there'd been more. This book was much more than I'd expected. Highly recommended.