Inventor of General Tso's Chicken dies in Taipei at age 98
The inventor of General Tso's Chicken and founder of famous Taiwanese Hunan-style restaurant chain Peng's Garden died in Taipei on Wednesday
According to an interview with the China Times, Peng says that his most famous dish was created in 1952 during a four-day visit by U.S. Seventh Fleet commander Admiral Arthur W. Radford. After three days, he had served the guests most of his repertoire of dishes, so to try and mix things up a bit, he decided to chop some chicken into big chunks, fry it to a golden hue and then added a different combination of sauce and seasoning to create a new dish.
The admiral was so impressed with the dish that he asked Peng what it was called, he thought quickly on his feet and said "General Tso's Chicken" (左宗棠雞).
Peng chose the name to honor General Tso, a famous military leader from Hunan who helped put down the Taiping Rebellion as well as other rebellions in the 1800s during the Qing Dynasty. He was well respected not only for his successes on the battlefield, but also for his contributions to Chinese agricultural science and education.
In the 1973, he opened a restaurant in New York City, where he began to gain the attention of officials from the nearby United Nations headquarters, including U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who was very impressed with his cooking. It was because of these high profile visits that media outlets started to report on his restaurant, including the New York Times, which ran one of the earliest published accounts of the dish in 1977:
The inventor of General Tso's Chicken and founder of famous Taiwanese Hunan-style restaurant chain Peng's Garden died in Taipei on Wednesday
According to an interview with the China Times, Peng says that his most famous dish was created in 1952 during a four-day visit by U.S. Seventh Fleet commander Admiral Arthur W. Radford. After three days, he had served the guests most of his repertoire of dishes, so to try and mix things up a bit, he decided to chop some chicken into big chunks, fry it to a golden hue and then added a different combination of sauce and seasoning to create a new dish.
The admiral was so impressed with the dish that he asked Peng what it was called, he thought quickly on his feet and said "General Tso's Chicken" (左宗棠雞).
Peng chose the name to honor General Tso, a famous military leader from Hunan who helped put down the Taiping Rebellion as well as other rebellions in the 1800s during the Qing Dynasty. He was well respected not only for his successes on the battlefield, but also for his contributions to Chinese agricultural science and education.
In the 1973, he opened a restaurant in New York City, where he began to gain the attention of officials from the nearby United Nations headquarters, including U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who was very impressed with his cooking. It was because of these high profile visits that media outlets started to report on his restaurant, including the New York Times, which ran one of the earliest published accounts of the dish in 1977:
"General Tso's thicken was a stir‐fried masterpiece, sizzling hot both in flavor and temperature, and dragon and phoenix was a combination of pearly, dewy fresh lobster chunks on one side of the platter and stir‐fried chicken with peanuts on the other."