Chef Peng Chang-kuei, who cooked up the recipe for General Tso’s Chicken, a perennial favorite Chinese dish in the US, has died of pneumonia at age 98.
The chef, who also founded the Hunan-style chain Peng’s Garden Hunan Restaurant, invented the sweet and slightly spicy, deep-fried staple that became a favorite in American-style Chinese eateries across the country.
The dish — believed to be named after Tso Tsung-tang, a Qing dynasty general – was introduced to the US by way of the Big Apple in the early 1970s as an example of Hunan cooking.
Peng, a Chinese native, began training at the age of 13, and fled to Taiwan after the 1949 Communist revolution. He told the China Times that he created General Tso’s in 1952, during a visit by US Seventh Fleet commander Admiral Arthur W. Radford.
When he ran out of offerings after three days, he decided to chop up some chicken, fry it to a golden hue, and then add a sauce and seasoning to create a new dish, the Taiwan Times reported.
Radford was so impressed with the dish that he asked Peng what it was called. The quick-thinking Peng blurted: “General Tso’s Chicken.”
In 1973, Peng opened Peng’s Restaurant on East 44th Street in Manhattan and soon attracted the attention of officials from the nearby UN headquarters. Among the devotees was Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
In 1977, The New York Times reviewed Peng’s Restaurant.
“General Tso’s thicken was a stir-fried masterpiece, sizzling hot both in flavor and temperature,” Mimi Sheraton wrote about the dish.
A 2014 documentary called “The Search for General Tso” explored the origins of the iconic dish, which was unknown in China.
One woman in the piece commented about the American-Chinese hybrid: “It doesn’t look like chicken. It looks like frog.”