Chop suey is a dish you'll see on almost any Chinese takeout menu—but that doesn't mean it comes from China. According to culinary legend, the dish of stir-fried meat, egg and vegetables was invented today, August 29, in 1896 in New York City.

When did chop suey become popular in America?

Chop suey started appearing in the 1880s, Bronson said, and it became a fashionable food for non-Chinese Americans–even though anti-Chinese racism was entrenched in law in the 1880s, as it would continue to be for decades.

Was chop suey invented in America?

Chop suey is widely believed to have been invented in the U.S. by Chinese Americans, but anthropologist E. N. Anderson, a scholar of Chinese food, traces the dish to tsap seui (杂碎, "miscellaneous leftovers"), common in Taishan (Toisan), a county in Guangdong province, the home of many early Chinese immigrants to the ...