He worked in a period generally known as the golden age of Hunanese cooking, when the capital Changsha was the center of a flourishing culinary scene.Īfter his hard years of apprenticeship, Peng Chang-kuei won acclaim as a chef in his own right.

Cao had previously served as private chef to the Nationalist official and great Hunanese gourmet Tan Yankai, and was one of the most outstanding cooks of his generation. As a teenager, he served as apprentice to Cao Jingchen, a famous chef who had just opened his own restaurant. Peng was born in 1919 into a poverty-stricken household in the Hunanese capital Changsha.

They took with them many talented people from the mainland, including a number of notable chefs, and foremost among them was Peng Chang-kuei. The real roots of the dish lie in the chaotic aftermath of the Chinese civil war, when the leadership of the defeated Nationalist party fled to the island of Taiwan. But although many Chinese dishes are named after famous personages (like, for example, the Sichuanese Gong Bao Chicken), there is no record of any dish named after General Tso in the classic texts on Hunanese food and cooking. The Hunanese have a strong military tradition, and General Tso is one of their best-known historical figures. He led successful military campaigns against various rebel groups, but is best known for recapturing the great western desert region of Xinjiang from rebellious Uyghur Muslims.

He was born in 1812 in Xiangyin county, Hunan province, and died in 1885 after a glittering career in the Qing dynasty civil and military administration. General Tso's chicken is named for Tso Tsung-t'ang (now usually transliterated as Zuo Zongtang), a formidable nineteenth-century general who is said to have enjoyed eating it. So how on Earth did this strange, foreign concoction come to be recognized abroad as the culinary classic of Hunan Province? And as I deepened my understanding of Hunanese food, I began to realize that General Tso's chicken was somewhat alien to the local palate, because Hunanese people have little interest in dishes that combine sweet and savory tastes. When I went to live there in 2003, I scoured restaurant menus for it in vain, and no one I met had ever heard of it. Despite its international reputation, however, the dish is virtually unknown in Hunan itself. A delectable concoction of lightly battered chicken in a chili-laced, sweet-sour sauce, it appears on restaurant menus across the world, but especially in the eastern United States, where it seems to have become the epitome of Hunanese cuisine. General Tso's (or Zuo's) chicken is the most famous Hunanese dish in the world.

Best general tso's chicken recipe ever