Chinese is one of the most popular cuisines for take-out. During the pandemic, we’ve either eaten outside at a restaurant or gotten “take-out” from all kinds of restaurants, but I was thinking about all the Chinese restaurants we’ve eaten at over the years. For a while, it seemed like it became a challenge to find the “best” Chinese restaurant in whatever city or country we were in.
A lot of Chinese dishes aren’t really “Chinese.” I’m sure you could say the same about most nationalities.
But one dish you find in just about all Chinese restaurants in the United States, that you almost never find in other countries is General Tso’s Chicken.
So who was this General Tso anyhow — and how did he become such a great chef? I guess I might as well get this out of the way right now — General Tso has essentially nothing to do with this Chinese chicken dish.
General Tso (Zur Zongtang) was a real guy — an actual Chinese general that rose to fame during the Taiping Rebellion of 1850-64. By the time that rebellion ended, General Tso was a household name. I know that beef Wellington is a dish named after the Duke of Wellington. So it seems reasonable that this chicken recipe might have been invented and named after General Tso, right? No — wrong.
General Tso’s chicken, as we know it today, wasn’t invented until the 1970s, in New York City — not in the southern provinces of China where General Tso earned his glory.
My extensive research determined that General Tso’s Chicken, a sweet, spicy, crispy chicken dish, was introduced in 1973 by Peng Jia, a onetime chef to the Chinese military and political leader Chiang Kai-shek. At the time, Peng Jia was the proprietor of a Manhattan Chinese restaurant named Peng’s.
Peng claimed that he actually invented the recipe while working for Chiang sometime in the 1950s, but that the original recipe was far different from the dish that many americans love today.
When Peng opened his New York restaurant in 1973, Hunan cuisine was virtually unheard of in the United States. Most Chinese restaurants in the US featured Cantonese cuisine, that is far blander and sweeter than Hunan food.
Peng was convinced the American taste was unprepared for the fiery, sour taste of his original dish, so he sweetened the recipe. The dish became an instant hit and gained massive exposure when Henry Kissinger, whose every move was covered in the social and gossip pages of the day, made Peng’s restaurant a regular hangout and General Tso’s Chicken was his usual meal. Before long, General Tso’s Chicken could be found on Chinese menus all across the United States.
Peng never explained why he came up with the name Genera Tso, but considering that he invented the dish for Chiang Kai-shek, he probably arrived at the name because it was one of several that the chef used to honor Chinese military greats of the past.
In 1990, Peng returned to Hunan province and opened a restaurant that featured the dish that made Hunan a popular Chinese cuisine, but the restaurant closed quickly. Apparently General Tso’s Chicken, the symbol of Hunan cooking in the US and much of the world, was too sweet for the Hunan people. I guess there’s no accounting for taste…
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