Asian Group

yuiyoshida

(41,831 posts) Sat Jan 31, 2015, 07:35 PM Jan 2015

The curious history of General Tso’s chicken

Here’s the first thing you should know: The general had nothing to do with his chicken. You can banish any stories of him stir-frying over the flames of the cities he burned, or heartbreaking tales of a last supper, prepared with blind courage, under attack from overwhelming hordes. Unlike the amoeba-like mythologies that follow so many traditional dishes, the story of General Tso’s chicken is compellingly simple. One man, Peng Chang-kuei — very old but still alive — invented it.

But what’s “it”? Because while chef Peng is universally credited with inventing a dish called General Tso’s chicken, he probably wouldn’t recognize the crisp, sweet, red nuggets you get with pork fried rice for $4.95 with a choice of soda or soup. All that happened under his nose. It all got away from him.

Chef Peng’s story starts in China, in his home province of Hunan, where he trained under a chef who worked in the home of a governmental official. In the way of really old-school governments, this official was a grand gourmet who spent much of his time collecting the finest culinary talent in the country under his roof, charging them with creating an innovative Hunan court cuisine. Their work borrowed from the haute cuisine of other Chinese regions and married them to the spicy, tart, salty flavors of the more peasant-oriented food of Hunan. Chef Peng inherited these dishes and skills, rising to prominence cooking banquets for Nationalist government bigwigs. When Mao took over in 1949, Peng, along with an entire generation of classically trained chefs, fled with their bosses to Taiwan, afraid for their lives and the ability to practice what would soon be called their reactionary cooking.

For decades, then, Taiwan was the repository for all of China’s classic regional cuisines, and there chef Peng opened a thriving restaurant, serving the Hunan court cuisine for the first time to the public. Incredibly skill- and labor-intensive, it featured dishes like chicken with bean sprouts, only the chefs meticulously removed the heads and tails from the sprouts and shredded the chicken to their exact size and shape, so that the finished dish looks, simply, like a platter of white threads. In the “Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook,” Fuchsia Dunlop recounts chef Peng saying that at some point in the 1950s, he created a dish, imbued it with the flavors most typical of Hunan, and named it in honor of General Tso, the second-most-famous military man from his home region. (Mao Zedong is the first, but it’s hard to blame Peng for not getting over that whole forced-into-exile thing.)

http://www.salon.com/2010/01/06/history_of_general_tsos_chicken/