Did The Real General Tso Have Anything To Do With The Beloved Chicken Dish?

Sometimes, sesame chicken with brown sauce from your local Chinese take-out joint just doesn't have the pizzazz you crave. Sometimes even homemade orange chicken, with its citrusy tang, won't scratch the itch. You need something bright, something hot, something with zing (maybe something you can make at home, too). You need General Tso's chicken. It's vividly colored compared with its milder counterparts and ranges from a rich bronze to an eye-popping red. And, when it comes to spice, even the most sugary variants have at least a little kick to them. It's also named after a Chinese general — surely that means something, right? Well, not necessarily.

The real General Tso was a 19th-century statesman from the Hunan province of China named Zuo Zongtang or Tso Tsung-t'ang. He's best known for his role in suppressing various uprisings across China, including the Taiping Rebellion. However, there is absolutely zero evidence that the General had anything to do with the chicken dish bearing his name. It does, however, have its own fascinating history.

The most commonly accepted origin story for General Tso's chicken is that it was invented by one Peng Chang-kuei, a chef who had trained under a prominent Hunanese restauranteur. By the middle of the 1940s, he was so prestigious as a chef that he presided over feasts and banquets for the Nationalist government of China. By the end of the decade, of course, fellow Hunan native, Mao Zedong, had risen to power, and Peng fled with the rest of the Nationalist government to Taiwan.

At some point over the next twenty-odd years, Peng created a chicken dish that was filled with the typical flavors of Hunanese cuisine: hot and sour and in-your-face. He thought of famous Hunanese figures he could name the dish after. Considering that Chairman Mao, the most famous person from Hunan, forced him to flee the country, he went for the less controversial General Tso.

It should be noted that the American version of General Tso's chicken doesn't have much to do with what Peng served at his restaurant in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan. American General Tso's is a sweet and spicy dish, a flavor combination Hunanese cuisine has never had much time for. Americanized General Tso's can be traced back to T.T. Wang, a Chinese chef in New York City who reinvented the dish.

Wang, preparing to open a Hunanese restaurant in Manhattan, traveled to Taiwan in 1971 and visited Peng's Taipei kitchen. Upon returning, he opened an eatery where the menu bore a curious resemblance to Peng's, including a dish very much like General Tso's chicken. Although Wang's dish was named "General Ching's chicken", his is much more in line with the version you can order today: crispier than Peng's, and much, much sweeter. Peng, incensed, opened his own restaurant in New York, which helped further establish General Tso's as a choice dish (with the help of famous fans including Henry Kissinger, because of course he'd show up at some point in this story). Still, it was Wang's version of the dish which retained its place as the definitive General Tso's to Americans, a fact that Peng remained rather bitter about.