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?


--
-Mark H. Zanger
author, The American History Cookbook, The American Ethnic Cookbook for
Students
www.ethnicook.com
www.historycook.com

Book signing: Jamaicaway Books, Jamaica Plain, Mass. Oct. 19, 3-5





"Phil" > wrote in message
...
> Hello again, all!
>
> After getting a touch off-topic on the oat/haggis thread, I thought I'd
> pursue my additional questions under a new subject line.
>
> The mention of homemade chow mein (I make chow mein all the time, but
> it's probably something different) had me wondering about the
> mysterious origins of two (or more) differently named, but otherwise
> similar, dishes.
>
> After attending culinary school, working in several fine New York
> restaurants, and doing quite a bit of outside reading, I can say I've
> been exposed to most of the German, Austrian, and Hungarian
> permutations on the goulash theme. Most involve paprika as an important
> seasoning, but apart from that, there's a pretty broad spectrum of
> soups and stews, thick and thin, spicy and not-so-spicy, red and white.
>
> At some point I remembered being served, as a kid, a dish my mother
> called "goulash". At the time I had never experienced it in any other
> form and thought nothing of it: that was what goulash was.
>
> As I recall it was a sort of homemade Hamburger Helper, the kind of
> one-dish meal a busy housewife might throw together. Basically it was
> ground beef, pasta (usually elbow macaroni), and a brown gravy, mixed
> together and functioning, essentially, as a stew. Chopped onion was
> probably involved, too.
>
> I have since encountered other people who recognize this as goulash
> (some of whom would not recognize beef cubes in a paprika sauce, light
> on the marjoram, as goulash). Variants I've heard of include using some
> or all tomato sauce (or soup) in lieu of the gravy, and I've been told
> by various people that what they grew up with is known as American Chop
> Suey (or sometimes just Chop Suey), and some Midwsesterners I know
> swear that this same dish, more or less, is also known, mysteriously,
> as John Marzetti. (Although the versions of John Marzetti I've seen
> seem to involve the canned cream-soup sauce, or sometimes some kind of
> tomato sauce, with melted, processed cheese.)
>
> So what relationship, if any, does this beef-a-roni stuff have to the
> European goulash traditions? What possible relevance could this have to
> Chop Suey? And who, in Heaven's name, is John Marzetti anyway???
>
> Does anybody have any light to shine on this murky set of seemingly
> disjointed questions?
>
> An example of the kind of thing I'm thinking of would be my own pet
> theory that the Central European goulash tradition was brought, more or
> less intact, to the U.S. by German immigrants, where it evolved, via
> goulash with noodles, to the modern "American goulash". Apart from my
> own family, with its mixed German, Irish, and other roots, it seems as
> though most of the people I've met who call the stuff goulash are of
> Pennsylvania Deutsch ancestry (these same people also seem to have a
> peculiar variant on beef Stroganoff, too, as a stew -- it's good, but
> nothing like the Franco-Russian chafing-dish classic).
>
> But that doesn't address the question of American Chop Suey (BTW, the
> story of chop suey -- the Chinese restaurant menu item, I mean -- being
> an American dish appears to be false). As for John Marzetti, at least
> it doesn't harken back to another, largely unrelated, dish, but I'm
> curious about the name.
>
> Phil