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Claim: The popular chinese dish chop suey is actually American.
Origins: Not everything offered on a Chinese menu is authentically Chinese, but a presumption has grown that at least the major items of fare are. In the case 
of chop suey, this expectation is certainly misplaced. Chop suey is purely American,and most likely dates from the 1860s.
Chop suey is a bland mixture of overcooked vegetables. (Which right there should tell you this dish can't be authentically Chinese Its origins are as mysterious as the dish itself is guileless. According to a favored bit of lore, chop suey is a mispronounciation of "chopped sewage," an angered Chinese cook having mixed together the day's garbage in a bit of broth and presented it to San Francisco restaurant patrons who'd earned his ire. Not knowing any better, those being insulted loved the dish, and much to the amused bewilderment of their tormentors, returned time and again to order it. (A similar story attachs to the Another account credits a resourceful cook who whipped up a dish of leftover meat and vegetables to placate a group of drunken miners. Yet another squares the responsibility on the shoulders of immigrant Chinese cooks charged with feeding laborers on the Pacific Railroad in California in the mid-1800s. When all the food they had to cook for dinner was an array of leftover odds and ends, they cooked it all together and called it chop suey. (Parents everywhere have learned this trick Another "origin" claims a uniquely-mannered Chinese man was invited to the White House for dinner. That night's menu proved unpalatable to him, so he excused himself from the table and whipped up his own dish out of whatever he could find in the White House kitchen. Some believe chop suey has a New York City origin, and go so far as to claim it was invented in 1896 by Chinese Ambassador Li Hung-Chang's chef. They say he devised this dish to appeal to both American and Oriental taste. Others claim the Ambassador often suffered acute indigestion after being plied with rich foods at obligatory banquets. His aide recommended a bland diet for the stricken Ambassador, and together they concocted chop suey. The 1896 date is impossible, seeing the Oxford English Dictionary's first citation of "chop suey" comes from 1888, with said entry showing the term was even at that earlier date in widespread use:
A staple dish for the Chinese gourmand is chow chop svey [sic], a mixture of chickens' livers and gizzards, fungi, bamboo buds, pigs' tripe, and bean sprouts stewed with spices.
Most likely, the dish came about because early Chinese miners and railway workers cooked together whatever vegetables and meats they had, and when Americans began buying meals from them, the Chinese dubbed the new Chinese-American invention "a little of this and that" or "chop suey."
In The Dictionary of American Food and Drink, John Mariani says the Mandarin words for chopped up odds and ends are "tsa sui," which is close enough to "chop suey" to support this theory. So is the OED's postulation of the Cantonese "shap suì" ("mixed bits") being anglicized into "chop suey." Indeed, the Cantonese origin theory is stronger, in light of most of the first Chinese immigrants being Cantonese. As for how the Chinese view the origin of this concoction, Grace Zia Chu, cookbook author and teacher of Chinese cooking, wrote in The Pleasure of Chinese Cooking that she was riding in Shanghai after World Barbara "floured drum song" Mikkelson Last updated: 20 February 2007 Urban Legends Reference Pages © 1995-2008 by snopes.com. This material may not be reproduced without permission. snopes and the snopes.com logo are registered service marks of snopes.com.  Sources:
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