Chop Suey, Andrew Coe
Chop Suey, Andrew Coe
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Chop Suey
A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States

Author: Andrew Coe

Narrator: Eric Jason Martin

Unabridged: 8 hr 16 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 07/20/2018

Categories: Cooking, Nonfiction


Synopsis

In 1784, passengers on the ship Empress of China became the first Americans to land in China, and the first to eat Chinese food. Today there are over 40,000 Chinese restaurants across the United States—by far the most plentiful among all our ethnic eateries. Now, in Chop Suey Andrew Coe provides the authoritative history of the American infatuation with Chinese food, telling its fascinating story for the first time.

It's a tale that moves from curiosity to disgust and then desire. From China, Coe's story travels to the American West, where Chinese immigrants drawn by the 1848 Gold Rush struggled against racism and culinary prejudice but still established restaurants and farms and imported an array of Asian ingredients. He traces the Chinese migration to the East Coast, highlighting that crucial moment when New York "Bohemians" discovered Chinese cuisine—and for better or worse, chop suey. Along the way, Coe shows how the peasant food of an obscure part of China came to dominate Chinese-American restaurants; unravels the truth of chop suey's origins; reveals why American Jews fell in love with egg rolls and chow mein; shows how President Nixon's 1972 trip to China opened our palates to a new range of cuisine; and explains why we still can't get dishes like those served in Beijing or Shanghai. The book also explores how American tastes have been shaped by our relationship with the outside world, and how we've relentlessly changed foreign foods to adapt them to our own deep-down conservative culinary preferences.

Andrew Coe's Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States is a fascinating tour of America's centuries-long appetite for Chinese food. Always illuminating, often exploding long-held culinary myths, this book opens a new window into defining what is American cuisine.

About Andrew Coe

Andrew Coe is a food writer and culinary historian who has written for Gastronomica, Saveur, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. He is the author of Chop Suey and coauthor, with Jane Ziegelman, of A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jim

What a novel idea! Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States examines Chinese-American relationships from the point of view of what our people thought of Chinese food during the 200-odd year history of Sino-American relations. At first, it was thought that Chinese food was f......more

Goodreads review by Carl

This is more a history of the American perception of China and Chinese foods. I was disappointed by the long diversions into the historical incidents. I book does not really deal with the explosion of interest in Chinese and all kinds of asian food in the 1980's and how that has changed American's f......more

Goodreads review by Robert

Andrew Coe, Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in America (Oxford, 2009) As someone who both was born in 1968 and is a lover of Chinese food, I actually lived through much of the last chapter of Andrew Coe's book, and I was somehow entirely unaware of it all. So as he was writing about the......more