Chinese Tsap Sui

Until the Second World War, Chinese cookery in America was synonymous with tsap sut, Cantonese for “miscellaneous things” or, when applied to food, “miscellaneous slops” or “fried miscellaneous.” The word comes from Toisan, according to C. Chang’s Food in Chinese Culture (1977), an area south of Canton “from which about half of all American Chinese trace their ancestry.” While the Americanized term “chop suey” did not appear in print until 1888