American Chop Suey

 

American Chop Suey

From the “Insights into American Life” collection of essays by Michael Field

 

The other day, my wife, Lenora, reminded me that I needed to up my game in terms of doing my share of the cooking. She was right, of course. She was doing practically all the actual meal planning and preparation; I was, at most, the sous chef helping on the periphery with side dishes, table setting, and cleanup.

Meal planning is not one of my strong suits, so I had to stop and think. What meal was I hankering for? When home, we are not exotic eaters; however, we do have a large collection of standards spanning multiple cuisines that we rotate through. So, what hadn’t we cooked up recently?

Then it came to me. There was a dish that I hadn’t had for decades. It was a staple in my house growing up, but I hadn’t eaten it since leaving home over fifty years ago.

I need to explain that I was raised in very modest circumstances. To support the family, my mother worked outside of the home, something very unusual for the 1950s and 60s. As a result, meal planning was eliminated – we had the same things week after week. And meal preparation was cut back to an absolute minimum. My mother would get home from work at 4:15 and, at 5:00, we would sit down to eat.

I grew up in New England and, per some cultural dictate, every Wednesday night was Prince spaghetti night. If we were lucky, my home-bound father would have made meatballs to gussy up the out-of-a-jar marinara sauce and simple pasta. Our part of Maine had a large Roman Catholic population thus, every Friday, fish was on special at the local supermarkets. Week after week, we had ungarnished swordfish, simply fried in the cast iron skillet. Saturday was beans and franks. The beans were always Burnham and Morrill New England style with kidney beans once a month for variety. Brown bread, heated in the can then pushed out and sliced, was a special treat. Sunday lunch was generally a pot roast or something similar. When done eating and washing dishes, my mother and I would go to the ‘farm’, her childhood home, to visit her mother and brother, staying until the late afternoon. As a result, Sunday dinner was something lighter and quicker to prepare, almost always French toast.  

That menu left three weekdays needing to be filled and every week it was the same thing. On Monday, my mother would make a large batch of American chop suey. The leftovers would stay in the pot, set out in the unheated entryway, the flavors melding making it better the next day. Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday; week after week, year after year; the same dish made in the same pot. It was a nondescript aluminum pot, oxidized to a pewter-like gray finish and battered with age. The black wooden handle, attached with an arched rod, could pivot out of the way to either side. The lid was a flat disk, lifted by a black, wooden, riveted-on cabinet knob. Its one feature was a small, hinged flap covering a vent to let out steam. I can still remember the feel of how the pot would teeter when carried out to the entryway, a room we called the shed as it tended to be the place things were put when you wanted them out of the way. Kerosene lamps, garden tools, a scale with a shiny brass dial. the chest freezer, and a collection of broken toys all shared space in the shed with the leftover chop suey.

My mother’s recipe was simple – a pound of hamburger browned with chopped onions, cooked elbow macaroni, a can of stewed tomatoes, and a can of lima beans. With no seasonings, the only flavor came from the onions and tomatoes. On Monday, the flavors and textures were distinct, stirred together yet each with its own entity. Thursday dinner was like having a different dish. The flavors had melded; the textures had met in the middle. What is strange about my recollections is that I can remember so many details about my mother’s American chop suey and so little about my mother.

Maybe I was trying to recapture that lost something when I told my wife that I was going to make my mother’s iconic dish. Lenora knew about the lima beans and was none too thrilled by my announcement. For the next week, she dragged things out of the freezer to avoid having to look down at a plate with slimy, green lumps of bitterness awaiting her every bite. Eventually, the frozen meals ran out and it was time for me to cook.

I decided I would spare my wife the lima beans. I would forego recreating my mother’s American chop suey and, instead, I went online to find an improved recipe. My primary goal was to find one with seasonings to excite my aging taste buds. The one I settled on was close to the original with hamburger, tomatoes, and elbow macaroni the primary ingredients. One side note about online recipes: they lie about the prep time. They cited 10 minutes prep; it took me longer than that to assemble the ingredients let alone peel and chop the onion, peel the four garlic cloves (something my house growing up never ever had!), and open the three different cans of tomato – paste, sauce and diced.

An hour later, I had recreated my childhood staple – actually, a much-improved version of it. And, as in my childhood, there was enough to last the two of us three meals – Monday, Tuesday with the third day’s leftovers stashed in the now empty freezer. Tuesday’s meal was again better than Monday as the flavors and textures had merged to just the right degree.

In making her iconic dish, I had not brought my mother back, but I had discovered something about myself. I learned that I could move on. I could leave the lima beans in the past and embrace the fresh garlic. I didn’t have the dented aluminum pot that had served our family for decades; instead, I used the new, Teal Blue Le Creuset dutch oven that we bought in January at the outlet store off I-95 in Georgia, a store we discovered by accident when looking for a highway rest area.

Two weeks after making my mother’s dish, a friend took us out to dinner at Kipos Greek Taverna in Chapel Hill. She insisted that we try their Pastitsio so I ordered it without checking the menu description. I knew I had truly moved on when what was set down in front of me was, to my surprise, a Greek version of American chop suey made special by a feta cheese gratin topping. It wasn’t my mother’s, in fact, I am sure she never had feta cheese in her life, but it was delicious.