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. But a similar chicken dish reached New York print before his restaurant did. On May 19, 1972, Women's Wear Daily, in an "At Table" column on the restaurant Hunam, presented a "General Ching's Chicken" as a dish served in New York for the first time. Hunam was T. T. Wang's restaurant, part of the Shun Lee line. Some hold that the remaking of the dish into fried chicken in New York started on Wang's side, but the column says nothing of batter, frying or sweetness and does not bear that view out. Accounts of how the dish spread through the city, Peng's restaurant among them, still differ. 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 follows Peng's claim to have created the dish in Taiwan.

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 T. T. Wang of Shun Lee Palace have claimed that they served a similar chicken dish in 1972, and a dish of that kind is on record in print. A May 1972 issue of Women's Wear Daily presented "General Ching's Chicken" at Wang's restaurant Hunam as new to New York, earlier than the opening of Peng's restaurant around 1973. Some hold that the turn to fried chicken in New York began on Wang's side, but the 1972 piece says nothing of batter, frying or sweetness and does not bear that view out. No single first cook has been settled on, and several accounts of how the dish spread through the city remain side by side. Even so, that a Hunan cook created the original form in a foreign land, and that it took root 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.