"Mark Zanger" wrote in
news:jSLeb.649621$YN5.499388@sccrnsc01:

Phil, I think "American Chop Suey" is differentiated from
Chinese-American, by *not* having soy sauce or bean sprouts, but being
a stew of beef and celery served on rice. I think the origin is the
WWI army manual recipe for "Chop Suey Stew" which I quote in my
American History Cookbook. Jean Anderson's _American Century Cookbook_
also dates it from the 1920s. Chinese-American chop suey is clearly
older, was served in 19th Century restaurants in Boston and San
Francisco, and is a bad transliteration of something from Choisan that
has never been identified, although suey is probably Tsui (cabbage or
general food). Chop may be an abbreviation of pidgin English
"chop-chop," meaning 'fast,' or just English 'chop' as slice or cut
rapidly.

Goulash was originally a cowherd's soup of stringy beef and caraway,
later dominated by paprika. It has a weird mirror life with chili con
carne, which was originally a cowherd's soup of stringy beef and
peppers, to which cumin seed and beans were added around San
Antonio... But the goulash you refer to is goulash in the sense of
"mixed up random stuff," presumably a response to the association of
the dish in Europe with Gypsies, and imported either by German
immigrants in the 19th Century, or directly responding to German and
Hungarian immigrants early in the 20th century. I'd look for early
20th century cites on a dish that clearly isn't mainly beef and
paprika.

Do you have a clear cite for Marzetti's restaurant, such as where it
was?



Jumping in here... Having been there many times, the original marzetti's
restaurant was in downtown Columbus, Ohio, and was a family run operation
for decades.

Wayne