The chef credited with inventing General Tso’s chicken (左宗棠雞), a world-famous Chinese dish smothered in a sweet sauce that was never a staple in China, has died in Taiwan aged 98.
Peng Chang-kuei (彭長貴) died of pneumonia on Wednesday last week in Taipei, his son, Chuck Peng (彭鐵誠), told The Associated Press. He was still cooking in the family’s Taipei restaurant kitchen just a few months ago.
Peng Chang-kuei took the sticky, sweet and spicy dish to New York about 40 years ago. It is now on Chinese restaurant menus across the US, exploding in popularity after then-US president Richard Nixon visited China in 1972. The dish also reportedly became a favorite of famed statesman Henry Kissinger.
However, General Tso’s chicken was never part of the Chinese culinary tradition.
The chef created the dish in the 1950s in Taiwan, where he fled in 1949 with former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) after the communists took over, said Chuck Peng, speaking from his home in Taipei.
In Taiwan, the chef helped welcome the commander of the US Navy’s 7th Fleet in the Pacific with a banquet that included the new culinary creation named after a 19th-century Chinese military leader from Peng Chang-kuei’s native Hunan Province.
By the 1970s, he was in New York running a restaurant named after himself near the UN on Manhattan’s East Side. Kissinger was a frequent guest, Chuck Peng said.
“General Tso’s chicken is so famous because of Henry Kissinger, because he was among the first to eat it, and he liked it, so others followed,” Chuck Peng said.
Americans quickly took to what is now a mound of deep-fried chunks of floured chicken, smothered in sweetness that usually includes soy sauce, sugar, ginger and other spices.
“The march of General Tso’s chicken has been long and wide,” said Jennifer 8. Lee (李競), author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles. “It’s the most popular of Chinese dishes in America, because it is sweet, fried and chicken — all things Americans love. It is easily a billion-dollar industry in and of itself.”
Chuck Peng runs the family’s chain of 10 restaurants in Taiwan, all called Peng’s. Until he was hospitalized a few months ago, his son said Peng Chang-kuei was a daily presence at their flagship Taipei restaurant, which opened after the chef left New York in 1983.
“My father thought other people’s cooking was no good,” his son said, chuckling. “The way he cooked was different, it was much better.”
While he was “very good to other people, he was very hard on his family” — seven children from three mothers. “He was very demanding, he didn’t want us to make any mistakes.”
Peng Chang-kuei’s funeral is on Thursday next week in Taipei.
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