General Tso’s chicken is unknown in General Tso’s home province
America’s favourite Chinese takeaway dish was invented in Taiwan, sweetened in New York, and was too sweet to sell in Hunan.
Zuo Zongtang (1812–1885) was a formidable general of the late Qing dynasty, from Hunan province. He helped crush the Taiping Rebellion and reconquered Xinjiang. There is no record of him eating anything like the chicken named after him.
Invented in Taiwan
After the Chinese Civil War, the Hunanese chef Peng Chang-kuei fled with the Nationalist government to Taiwan. In Taipei, around the 1950s, he created a dish of fried chicken in a hot, sour Hunan-style sauce, and named it after his province’s most famous general. In the documentary The Search for General Tso (2014) he recalls cooking it for a state banquet in 1952.
Sweetened in New York
In 1973 Peng opened Uncle Peng’s Hunan Yuan in Manhattan. Around the same time T. T. Wang at Shun Lee Palace served a crispy version called General Ching’s chicken. American diners loved it, and the sauce became sweeter and the chicken crispier. Copies spread to takeaways across North America.
Rejected at home
When Peng later opened a restaurant in Hunan serving the dish, local diners found it too sweet, and the restaurant soon closed. Peng died in Taipei in 2016, aged 98.
The writer Jennifer 8. Lee, who also traced the fortune cookie, uses General Tso’s chicken as her favourite example of American Chinese food. It is a cuisine in its own right, invented by immigrants for a new audience, and no less real for not being “authentic”.
Bring it up
“General Tso never ate General Tso’s chicken. It was invented in Taiwan, and people in his home province found it too sweet.”
Follow the thread
- Same patternFortune cookies are Japanese, by way of California Two staples of American Chinese food whose roots are not on the Chinese mainland.
- Same patternThe Earl of Sandwich probably wasn’t gambling A dish named after a famous man who had nothing to do with it, or very little.
- In contrastSichuan pepper makes your lips buzz at 50 Hz Authentic regional Chinese flavours versus their Americanised versions.
