"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