Why Hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophes, where today’s post is not-at-all delayed by frugal, sensible festivities for my brother’s birthday yesterday, but instead was delayed by me just taking a lazy Sunday afternoon. A fact I do not apologize for, since, I mean, we weren’t all that delayed, were we? What does ANY of this have to do with today’s dish? Just that it’s unexpected, a little indulgent, and surprisingly simple. You can speak the explanation and get straight to the stove top with THIS LINK, while everyone else goes on a brief journey to…somewhere unclear.

Oh, to Foo Young again, like a Spring Chicken

Today’s dish is a St Paul sandwich, a REMARKABLY specific regional dish, made famous in…St…Louis.

Legitimately all I know about St Louis is this arch, references to Nelly songs, and barbecue.

Yes, the St Paul sandwich does NOT come from St Paul. Technically. Hell, you could argue whether or not it’s truly AMERICAN. You would be WRONG to argue that, but it’s possible. Anything’s possible when you’re dumb. (Did I mention I had a glass of wine during my lazy Sunday? And that wine tends to give me a fast hangover? Daddy does not have time for your SHIT today. And now I’ve referred to myself as Daddy, which, I assure you, disturbs and vaguely disgusts even me.)  Where the fuck was I? Oh, yeah, St Louis.  So, sometime in the 1930’s or 40’s, SOMEONE started making this sandwich in St Louis, Missouri. The best attributions we have (because, again, for some reason, 1880 to 1945 was a hell-pit for historical tracking of foodstuffs) suggest that Steven Yuen, a chef in downtown St Louis, invented the dish at his restaurant Park Chop Suey naming it after his home-town of St Paul, Minnesota.  Which, I mean, feels like too precise of a story to be made up. Park Chop Suey is STILL OPEN, so if they were run by a chef named Steven Yuen from St Paul, that feels like it HAS to be the explanation.

I’m not saying Minnesota isn’t a lovely place. I’m saying that this is not a town to randomly decide to attribute food to 450 miles away.

Speaking of explanations: what the fuck IS a St Paul Sandwich? Well, it’s a sandwich of white bread, mayo, pickle, lettuce, tomato, and egg foo young. Which you should have guessed, given the section title.  I had personally never heard of it, since the closest I’ve ever come to Missouri was around 32,000 feet, because I’m a coastal elite, so fuck any state more than 800 miles from an ocean. Fun fact: I added that number because I have visited Wyoming, Montana, and Colorado, and found them all fine places…but it turns out Missouri is actually less than 800 miles from the Atlantic.  So I GUESS we have to talk about it (In fact, if you count the Gulf of Mexico, there are only like, 5 states that don’t meet that criteria.)  BUT it showed up as a recipe in a cookbook, and here’s the thing: as I noted for egg week: my family is not hurting for eggs. So “fried egg sandwiches with some extra steps” sounded like an EASY sell. Only one thing stood in my way: Egg Foo Young.

Egg Foo Young is one of nature’s most baffling predators, a fried (often Deep-fried) omelette of various meats and vegetables, that hunts by using cholesterol to take out prey much larger than itself. The spelling is a TOTAL fucking mess (egg foo young, egg fu yong, egg foo/fu yung, egg RU yong, egg fu RONG, just…everything), and the history is arguably WORSE. Here’s what we know about egg fu yung: It has fucking eggs in it. 

And that’s ONLY if you ensure it has the word “egg” in it.
LIke, if you search Fu Rong, you get THIS.
Granted, that’s potentially because there’s a restaurant named “Fu Rong Hua” in Hanoi. so this might just be a random pic of food from there.

Seriously, I have seen accredited historians of Chinese cuisine suggest that it’s connected with “ru yong”, which is a variety of savory egg CUSTARD. Others point to a dish of Cantonese origin, “chicken fu yung” meaning “Hibiscus petal chicken” referring to a dish of slices of chicken meat arranged like flower petals. And here’s what makes that super irritating…Guess what “ru yong” means:  “Hibiscus petals’, because apparently it’s just a disagreement in how to convert the Chinese sounds into  English letters. So depending where you are, the same NAME of dish can get you a savory custard with chicken in it, OR delicate arrangements of sliced meat/eggs. (As a note, this was the explanation I found while first researching the dish, which I mentioned in a post several years ago, blindly wandering through what was actually a highly contentious argument without seeing.) I have seen other historians claim that this dish is faithfully copied from a fried dish in Cantonese cooking, and others assert that it’s based on nothing. That it’s just a name they took from other foods and applied to something new.

That’s right, this dish is so confused and strange that CHINA, a country that LOVES to bring up its 5,000 years of history, isn’t fully sure that it’s Chinese. Many Chinese immigrant families figured it was like Egg Rolls, some weird thing other immigrants made for Americans. And…they’re probably right? And also, this might be the secret heart of a classic American dish? Oh, buckle up, friends, things are just getting STARTED.  

The Wild, Fryin’ West

I want to start off by illustrating something a little weird. Omelet, or omelette, is a word English stole from French. Because it was the Wild West of linguistics back then. Anyhow, the important thing is that THIS is what a French omelet looks like:

Pale, gooey, green.

The term for the ‘proper’ internal texture of a French omelet is baveuse, a term I was told long ago means “dog snot”. Which is incorrect. It means “dog slobber”. (Technically, it means “drool/slobber” in general, and the connection to dogs is from the description of at least one famous French chef, meant to indicate how thick the still-somewhat runny eggs are supposed to be. “Not drool, but slobber. Thick, like a dog’s.) Which is interesting, because that’s sure as shit not how most omelettes I encounter look. But there’s one interesting feature I see more often in Western/Denver omelettes than any other:

It’s the browning. Like, you don’t have to brown eggs to fry them, or make an omelette. Hell, even Nate, who likes his eggs just this side of rubbery, made two omelettes with fairly minimal browning. It’s weird. OR IS IT? (From a purely technical point, no. That browning basically just means the eggs were cooked at a higher heat, since the browning is just maillard reactions. So it implies that Americans cook their omelets on higher heat than in France. )

BUT, I just referenced the Western/Denver Omelet, a dish with two names for the same thing: an omelet of bell Peppers, Ham, Onions, maybe mushrooms. A dish that was supposedly invented by a pioneer woman to the Denver area, who tried to mask the taste of rotten eggs with green bell peppers, onions, and ham, in a story that is…pretty unbelievable. Like, first off all: rotten eggs are NOTORIOUS for their pungency. You think you’re going to beat that with ONION and GREEN BELL PEPPER? Like, if this was a mixture of cumin, garlic, and jalapeñoes, maybe I’d buy that someone could think it would beat the taste of rotten eggs, but green bell peppers and onion sure ain’t doing it. Also, Green Bell Peppers would not have been available for a ‘pioneer woman in the Denver area”. That’s like suggesting a medieval French king had access to sushi.

Some historians contend believe that the Denver Omelette is an attempt for western cooks to replicate Egg foo young. Egg fu yung is an omelet that can be made with ANY meat (but ham would have been the least difficult for railroad workers to access: beef was expensive, seafood was too far away, and killing a chicken means less eggs, so take the salted and cured pork product), mixed with onions, sometimes mushrooms, and things like mung bean sprouts, green onion, bamboo shorts, all of which were added for crunchiness, which green bell pepper adds. And because egg foo young is deep fried, it is very brown.

So brown it basically looks like fried chicken.

Also, and this is a weird point, but French omelets tend to be either rolled, or made into a tri-fold, while American omelettes tend to be folded once. Which sounds like nothing…except you have to FLIP an egg foo young partway through frying. So, like, if you were trying to pantomime/explain with imprecise English how to make egg fu yung, the explanation would look a lot more like a guide to making an American style omelet instead of a French one: you’d want high heat, more oil, meat and crunchy veggies, you’d “flip”/”Fold” it, get it brown… I’m not saying that the American conception of an omelet is basically the mid-point between making Egg foo young and a French Omelet….but yes, I am.

Amazingly, some food historians go even further, suggesting that a prototypical form of the St Paul Sandwich may have been the original place the Denver omelet took place: Chinese railway workers might have shared egg foo young with other workers, who carried it between bread for a sort of breakfast sandwich. That the bread might have later been removed, and the dish eaten like a “normal” omelette, only to later be added BACK on for our main course today.

Speaking of, I have rambled for quite some time, so let’s talk about how we make this. 

Foo Young Fried and Sandwich Applied

The recipe is basically a two-step process, of “make Egg Foo Young, put it in a pretty normal sandwich”. So the first part is of course going to be the hard one. And even then, it’s not super hard. It uses a couple weird ingredients, and mine briefly slightly betrays me, but it’s not HARD.

First, you gotta cut up some stuff. You gotta get a cup of chopped onion, 5 ounces of diced ham (not too fine, but not too big, either. Think like, 1 cm, or 1/3 of an inch. ) and mung bean sprouts.

Interestingly, sprouted mung beans have a lot of nutrition, while mung bean sprouts are basically just water and fiber.

Mung Bean sprouts, if you haven’t worked with them, are likely in your produce section near the other Asian stuff like wonton wrappers and kimchi (which is a weirdly common subsection of supermarket produce).  They taste like basically nothing, smell a little weird, and are just kind of crisp and wet. They’re like…less bitter celery, for the not-weird comparison. For the WEIRD comparison, they’re “what if fluorescent tube light-bulbs were tiny water balloons”)

Chop those suckers up with the others, and make an egg mix. 4 eggs, and what’s going to feel like a lot of seasoning: a ½ teaspoon each of granulated garlic, table salt, and white pepper. Just remember that these eggs have to balance out the sprouts and the onion. Also, white pepper is the other weird ingredient.

Seen here, impersonating sand.

White pepper is just the SEED of the pepper plant, which is used to make Green, Black, White, AND Red peppercorns in a process we don’t really have time to cover. It’s a little less pungent than black pepper, a little warmer than purely ‘spicy’, and is used in French cooking for a BUNCH of recipes…for color. Like, if you want perfectly white mashed potatoes, you obviously can’t add a lot of little black specks to them. Same with eggs, and other pale dishes: if you want pepper flavor, without pepper color, white pepper’s your boy.

Toss your egg with the meat and veg, and get some oil heating up. I went with more than the recipe called for, because, again, we’re trying to almost deep-fry here. So for a 12” skillet (By the recipe at least. Our skillets aren’t labeled, and I didn’t measure. I’ll do it in the morning. Morning Jon here: it was NOT a 12” skillet, it was a 9.5”.) I used 1 cup of oil, almost double the recipe.

I then made/discovered a series of mistakes. Firstly, I discovered that I didn’t break up my chopped onions. Like, when you chop onions, the little rings are still sticking together, before they come apart when you toss them around and stir them up. But I guess, since I coated them in egg before stirring, that they’d kind of glued together.

It taunts me, Mr Starbuck.

This lead to me spending a couple minutes separating onion layers by hand, in a process I’m not sure was necessary. THEN, like Icarus, I flew too close to the sun. See, the recipe says to add all the egg mixture to the pan, in 4 distinct blobs. I added two blobs, and immediately said “there no way I’m fitting two more in here.”

I then ignored that impulse, and tried to add a third one, to even LESS space.

Once I had that extra batch in…well, it wasn’t a complete failure, but I wouldn’t call it a success. I decided to fry these three as one batch, and the last quarter of the mixture with the pan all to itself.

At which point I discovered the pan I’d chosen didn’t have a lid that fit it, so I couldn’t cover it like I was supposed to. I dug around and found a larger lid that I draped over, and went to town. And…On the one hand, I could say that “everything went fine”, and it would technically be correct. ON the other, I could say “a lot of bullshit happened”, and it would also be correct. My egg foo young took longer to cook than they were supposed to, which could easily have been my fault, if I didn’t let the oil get to the proper temp/adding the third egg mix might have dropped the temp. Flipping them was also a bit of a pain, just because the relatively shallow oil meant that I had to wiggle the egg rafts off of the bottom of the pot. (which, again, maybe my oil wasn’t hot enough. I was supposed to heat until ‘just smoking’, but I accidentally got some water in the pot, so it might have just been boiling that off, and what I thought was smoke was steam. (it might also be because we have a 30+ year old stove)(Or because, again, we were using a much smaller pan, so our eggs couldn’t spread as much as they were supposed to. Though, mathematically, if I had just done two eggs per batch, they’d have actually ended up with 20% MORE space than the recipe expects them to have. ) The point is that in terms of things that I had to do, it was pretty easy, but also that it took twice as long as it should have, and I spent a fair bit of that time worried.

Is this good? Enough? It looks VERY much like it did 6 minutes ago.

Once fried, the foo young go on a paper-towel-lined plate to drain a little, while you assemble the sandwich. Which EVERY source I checked was certain on the specifics. You want mayo, and then lettuce, DILL Pickles, and tomato. Of which I got ONE vegetable right, and it’s the one that I personally don’t like, dill pickles. (They’re fine, I just prefer other types of pickles). We didn’t do tomato because Nate hates raw tomato and we didn’t have any, and we used a greens mix of like, spinach, lettuce, etc, instead of straight up lettuce. I also served it with Pizza Margherita chips, because if I’m doing “foods stuffed into other foods”, it just fit.

Also, a nice color contrast.

And I have to say, the results were surprisingly good. I don’t eat a lot of egg foo young (as at least one Chinese critic notes, it can be a tricky dish to get right), but the fried egg and veggies were pretty solid in the sandwich. I think it’d be a little better in a more posh sandwich, as Nate and I had reached the end of the loaf, so we each got one of the heels, and I think the heel is pretty close in texture to the egg foo young. But overall, the flavors were fine. I think I would prefer a sweeter pickle, (I actually used one of the left-over patties for lunch today, and honestly, I have to admit, the dill cuts the richness better for this use)  and I legitimately feel like this is a recipe that would have a pretty quick comfort curve: like, the majority of my complaints were “I have no idea if I’m frying this right”, so after 2-3 times of making it, I’m sure it would be easy as pie. And it also feels like a dish ripe for riffing: This version used mung bean sprouts, onion, and ham, but what about swapping the mung beans for water chestnuts, or bamboo shoots? Why not green peppers, and make a Denver-omelet sandwich? Swap the ham for chicken, or shrimp, or whatever. The original Park Chop Suey offers the sandwich in a variety of meats, including ‘combo’, and at least one other St Louis restaurant makes theirs with sprouts, onion, green pepper for veggies and shrimp, chicken, AND beef for meats. It’s not quite as rewarding as the Egg fold in terms of Effort to results, but it’s a neat little take on a fried egg sandwich. The biggest downside I can personally attest to is that the smell of the frying oil lingered in the house for like, 3 hours. If you can put up with that, I say give it a shot.

WEDNESDAY: JON DESCRIBES THIS WEEK’S NEW THEME, BECAUSE HE WANTS A DAY WHERE HE’S NOT FURIOUSLY MAKING FOOD. WHILE WE TALK PARADOXES AND FAMILIARITY.

FRIDAY: JON GOES BACK TO BRITAIN, TO MAKE SOMETHING AMERICAN. AN AMERICAN MEATLOAF, UNRECOGNIZABLE TO MANY AMERICANS.

RECIPE

St Paul Sandwich

Makes 4 sandwiches

Ingredients

4 large eggs

½ teaspoon table salt

½ teaspoon granulated garlic

½ teaspoon white pepper

1 cup chopped onion

1 cup other crunchy vegetable, such as mung bean sprouts (classic), green pepper (Denver), etc.

5 ounces ham steak(classic) or other meat cut into cubes smaller than ½”

1/2 cup to 1 cup vegetable oil

8 slices white bread

Mayonnaise

Dill pickles, Lettuce, and sliced Tomatoes, for sandwich

Preparation

1. Heat the oil over medium heat in a 12” skillet until just smoking. As it heats, whisk together eggs, salt, garlic and pepper, and fold into the egg mixture the ham, onion, and vegetables.

2. Once oil is heated, using a ½ cup dry measuring cup, scoop out 4 portions of the egg mixture, and pour one at a time into each quadrant of the pan. (it’s okay if they connect) Cover and let cook at least 5 minutes, until bottoms are well browned, and tops are set.

3. Separate the egg foo young if necessary, and flip, covering and cooking another 3-4 minutes until the new bottoms are browned. Move to a paper-towel-lined plate, and let dry for 1 minute.

4. Add the toppings of your choice to the sandwiches, add the egg foo young, and serve.