This delicacy is a staple for anyone who has ever eaten out of a cardboard carton that was delivered by an intense young man wearing a baseball cap and a rain poncho and peddling a spindly bicycle with one flat tire. (I should point out: fatty Chinese cuisine is one of the four basic food groups of most journalists –the other three being beer, pizza and day-old coffee. I have no doubt Chinese take-out is partly responsible for the inordinately high rate of heart disease and sneering cynicism that are both so prevalent among journos. But I digress…)
Anyway, allow me to take a sidestep away from Things Religious to point out this little story from Salon, about a menu item that I will always hold close to my heart:
Unlike the amoeba-like mythologies that follow so many traditional dishes, the story of General Tso’s chicken is compellingly simple. One man, Peng Chang-kuei — very old but still alive — invented it.
But what’s “it”? Because while chef Peng is universally credited with inventing a dish called General Tso’s chicken, he probably wouldn’t recognize the crisp, sweet, red nuggets you get with pork fried rice for $4.95 with a choice of soda or soup. All that happened under his nose. It all got away from him.
Chef Peng’s story starts in China, in his home province of Hunan, where he trained under a chef who worked in the home of a governmental official. In the way of really old-school governments, this official was a grand gourmet who spent much of his time collecting the finest culinary talent in the country under his roof, charging them with creating an innovative Hunan court cuisine. Their work borrowed from the haute cuisine of other Chinese regions and married them to the spicy, tart, salty flavors of the more peasant-oriented food of Hunan. Chef Peng inherited these dishes and skills, rising to prominence cooking banquets for Nationalist government bigwigs. When Mao took over in 1949, Peng, along with an entire generation of classically trained chefs, fled with their bosses to Taiwan, afraid for their lives and the ability to practice what would soon be called their reactionary cooking.
For decades, then, Taiwan was the repository for all of China’s classic regional cuisines, and there chef Peng opened a thriving restaurant, serving the Hunan court cuisine for the first time to the public. Incredibly skill- and labor-intensive, it featured dishes like chicken with bean sprouts, only the chefs meticulously removed the heads and tails from the sprouts and shredded the chicken to their exact size and shape, so that the finished dish looks, simply, like a platter of white threads. In the “Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook,” Fuchsia Dunlop recounts chef Peng saying that at some point in the 1950s, he created a dish, imbued it with the flavors most typical of Hunan, and named it in honor of General Tso, the second-most-famous military man from his home region. (Mao Zedong is the first, but it’s hard to blame Peng for not getting over that whole forced-into-exile thing.)
You’ll want to read on to find out how it arrived in New York, and then multiplied and spread.
And you may want to then pick up the phone and order some for delivery …
