The renowned restaurateur who invented General Tso’s Chicken has passed away at the ripe old age of 98. Bet you thought the General’s chicken hailed from the dynastic era! But it’s actually one of those perennial favourites on Chinese Food menus that was created just in the last century or two…
Chef Peng in later life. Actually, cooking was his life!
It’s sweet, spicy and crunchy – exactly what you want from a Chinese-style stir-fry dish. And it has a legit-sounding name that speaks of the great age of the Chinese Emperors. But it was actually created by Taiwanese restaurateur named Chef Peng Chang-kuei, owner of several eateries in Taipei, the capital. It was back in 1952, when Peng was just a young, upstart, emerging culinary star, that he had the honour of cooking for U.S. Admiral Arthur W. Radford, Commander of the visiting U.S. Seventh Fleet. Nothing on the regular menu seemed special enough, so Peng went out on a limb and created the now-familiar sweet-hot-sour fried chicken dish.
Anyway…
The Admiral liked the dish so much that he asked the chef its name. It didin’t have one, at that moment, of course; but the next moment, it did. Peng pulled the name of a famous 19th Century Chinese military leader, General Zuo Zongtang, out of mid air and it was immediately corrupted to ‘General Tso’. You’ll also see it referred to as ‘General Tzo’s’, ‘General Tao’s’ or ‘General Gao’s’ Chicken, depending on where you want to order it. In fact, there are at least a dozen different spellings of the General’s name in use, according to the phonetic peculiarities of the dialect of Mandarin or Cantonese your menu is written in…
Wikipedia has the following to say about the dish’s culinary genealogy:
…The reference to “Zongtang” was not a reference to Zuo Zongtang’s given name, but rather a reference to the homonym “zongtang”, meaning “ancestral meeting hall”. Consistent with this interpretation, the dish name is sometimes (but considerably less commonly) found in Chinese as “Zuo ancestral hall chicken”. (“Chung tong gai” is a transliteration of “ancestral meeting hall chicken” from Cantonese; “Zuǒ Zōngtáng jī” is the standard name of General Tso’s chicken as transliterated from Mandarin.)
Odd that they didn’t know about Chef Peng!
I don’t believe in coincidences…
Now, Chef Peng passed away at the age of 98 after a long and fulfilling life, filling his restaurant customers full of his Cantonese delights.
Now, flash back a few days to our post about Michael James ‘Jim’ Delligatti, creator of the Big Mac, who also died at age 98 this past week. These things always happen in threes, my maternal Grandmother always insisted. She had a special gift for predicting such occurrences, too; a gift of her descent from a long line of Celtic Princesses who were divining the future when my ancestors were still painting themselves blue to ward off the Vikings…
So… Who will be next? I’ll let you know as soon as I hear the news.
~ Maggie J.