General Tso's chicken (sometimes Governor Tso's chicken, General Tao's chicken, General Tsao's chicken, General Tang's chicken or simply General's Chicken) is a sweet, slightly spicy, deep-fried chicken dish that is popularly served in North American Chinese restaurants. The dish was unknown in China and other lands home to the Chinese diaspora before it was introduced by chefs returning from the United States. The dish is named after General Tso Tsung-tang, or Zuo Zongtang, a Qing dynasty general and statesman, although the connection is tenuous. He is said to have enjoyed it, and perhaps helped create a dish, but there are no recorded recipes.
The real roots of the dish lie in the post-1949 exodus of chefs to the United States. The dish is reported to have been introduced to New York City in the early 1970s as an example of Hunan cooking, though it is not typical of Hunanese cuisine, which is traditionally very spicy and rarely sweet. The dish was first mentioned in The New York Times in 1977.
Read more about General Tso's Chicken: Name and Origins, Recipes, Nutrition
Famous quotes containing the words general and/or chicken:
“One general builds his success on ten thousand bleaching bones.”
—Chinese proverb.
“Sometimes I lifted a chicken that warn’t roosting comfortable, and took him along. Pap always said, take a chicken when you get a chance, because if you don’t want him yourself you can easy find somebody that does, and a good deed ain’t ever forgot. I never see papa when he didn’t want the chicken himself, but that is what he used to say, anyway.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)