General Tso's chicken Period BOrigin theory CVerified

General Tso's chicken is fried chicken tossed in a thick, sweet-and-sour sauce. Chicken and soy sauce are old ingredients in East Asia, and the chili used in the sauce had settled into East Asian cooking early, so the raw materials were on hand. Yet for this particular sweet-and-sour fried chicken to appear, it took a seasoning tuned to American palates and the New York Chinese restaurants of the 1970s that served it.

The starting point of the story is the Hunan-born cook Peng Chang-kuei. Having moved to Taiwan in 1949, he devised a new chicken dish for a banquet. Peng himself recalled it as a 1952 creation, though the visit of Admiral Radford, said to be the guest of honor at that banquet, is dated to June 1953 in American diplomatic records. Either way, the first General Tso's chicken was in the Hunan manner, hot and sharp with sourness, and made without sugar.

Around 1973 Peng opened a restaurant on East 44th Street in New York. There, to suit the tastes of American diners, the dish was remade into battered, deep-fried chicken coated in a sweet-and-sour sauce. This sweet-and-sour fried form appears in New York print in a 1977 restaurant review, which praises a dish as a stir-fried masterpiece. The plate born in Taiwan thus grew, in New York, into a defining dish of American Chinese cooking.

The dish's name has long been believed to come from the famed Qing general Zuo Zongtang (1812-1885): a plate he favored, the common notion holds, or one made in his honor, the name attached through the shared native province of Hunan.

But Zuo Zongtang never ate this dish. The naming was a later attribution, and the dish itself was made nearly seventy years after the general's death. Its creator, Peng Chang-kuei, left his own testimony: interviewed by TIME, he denied any connection to Zuo Zongtang and said he had improvised the name, borrowing the general's on the strength of their shared Hunan roots. Other accounts of the naming were floated as well, such as one reading Zuo's name into the sound of zongtang, the hall where ancestors are honored, but Peng's own testimony comes before them. The documentary The Search for General Tso (2014) likewise traces Peng's authorship and the fabricated tie to Zuo Zongtang.

The account of the Americanization in New York is not single either. Alongside the view that Peng's restaurant spread the dish, Michael Tong and others of Shun Lee Palace claim to have served a similar chicken dish in 1972, so a rival account over New York priority stands beside it. Even so, that a Hunan cook created the original form in a foreign land and rooted it on the American table is the settled trunk of the story, supported by his own testimony and by several food-history records. What remains, once the tale of the general is peeled away, is the clear trail of a dish born in Taiwan and transformed in New York.