![]() ![]() By frying the meat in batter and drenching it in a sweet, sticky sauce, he was able to adapt the dish to America’s idea of Chinese cuisine. S., and he had some ideas for how to make it his own. He wanted to introduce Peng’s famous chicken to the U. ![]() His recipe was directly inspired by a visit he took to Peng’s restaurant in Taipei, Taiwan. That’s when, according to the most popular story, Chinese-American chef Tsung Ting Wang (sung ting wang) began serving his take on General Tso’s chicken at the trendy Hunan Restaurant in New York City. That version didn’t hit menus until the 1970s. It bore only a superficial resemblance to the sticky-sweet concoction that’s served in American Chinese restaurants today. This early General Tso’s wasn’t fried, and it was sometimes served on the bone instead of cut into bite-sized chunks. He described the recipe as heavy, sour, hot, and salty-all flavors characteristic of Hunan cuisine. The original General Tso’s chicken Peng cooked six years later borrowed heavily from his Hunanese roots. The dish’s inventor had been a chef for the Chinese Nationalist government, and he fled to Taiwan with his employers following the Communist revolution in 1949. General Tso’s chicken is the perfect example. When we say “Chinese food” here in the west, we’re usually talking about products of Chinese immigrants tailoring their cooking to suit local palates. And that opened our eyes to the possibility of our food being acceptable to people from all walks of life. Of course that passion has changed over the years, since I joined in 2009 it was more of sharing this food with everyone, because when foodies such as the late Anthony Bourdain went to our restaurant, it really opened everyone's eyes to this type of food. So that's really his motivation, his passion. It wasn't about feeding everyone, even though anyone is welcome to eat, but for my father it was more about his homesickness from our hometown of Xi'an, and just wanting to recreate that experience for himself, and also to share with fellow immigrants like himself. Originally, when the restaurant was founded, it was all about feeding fellow immigrants. In building their company, Jason and his father were faced with the question of how much to adapt the cuisine of Xian to suit American palates. Jason Wang is the owner and operator of Xian Famous Foods, a restaurant chain based in New York that focuses on the food of his family’s original hometown in Northwest China. It would probably seem strange to an American to lump bagels, barbecue, and lobster rolls into one big “American food” bucket, and yet that’s often how we approach the food of a country with more than four times our population. I’ll venture a guess that most people living outside of China have never thought about Tianjin cuisine (with the obvious exception of some Chinese immigrants, and a hat tip to the food writer Robert Sietsma, who did profile the growing number of New York restaurants representing Tianjin in a piece that we’ve linked to below). ![]() There are also long-standing influences from European cuisine, thanks to a treaty foisted on the region in the aftermath of the Opium Wars more than 150 years ago. It boasts of famous banquet dishes like the “Eight Great Bowls'' and humbler-yet-still-beloved snacks like Goubuli Baozi, a type of stuffed steamed bun with a name translating to something like “even dogs will not pay attention to it.” As a port city, seafood plays a prominent part in Tianjin’s food scene. Or just buy an almanac.) The cuisine of Tianjin is renowned in China. The answer is Tianjin, but don’t feel too bad if that didn’t immediately spring to mind-I had to look it up. It’s got about a millennium of history and more people living in it than New York City, so you might think it’d be common knowledge. Do you know what the 4th most populous city in China is? Why are so many “Chinese food” dishes more at home in strip malls abroad than they are in China? What does “Chinese food” even mean for a country so vast and culinarily diverse? Open your takeout containers and break apart your disposable chopsticks: Today, we’re digging into the cuisine of the Chinese diaspora, from the birth of Chinese Food in America to a new generation of immigrants who are reevaluating what Chinese food outside of China can be. It never caught on there, but today you can find General Tso’s chicken on thousands of menus across North America. Peng named the dish after the war hero because they both hailed from Hunan. In fact, when chef Peng Chang-kuei developed an early version of the recipe in Taiwan around 1955, Tso had already been dead for 70 years. Though General Tso’s chicken was named after Tso, he didn’t invent it. He led several successful military campaigns, but today most people know him for a chicken dish involving nuggets of fried meat coated in a sweet and spicy sauce. Zuo Zongtang was a Hunanese military leader during the Qing Dynasty. ![]()
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