General Tso's chicken

General Tso's Chicken

General Tso's chicken
Alternative names	Zuo Zongtang, General Tao Chicken, Zuo Gong Ji
Course	Main
Serving temperature	Hot
Main ingredients	Chicken, ginger, garlic, soy sauce, rice vinegar Shaoxing wine or sherry, sugar, sesame oil, scallions, hot chili peppers, batter
Variations	Orange chicken (Westernized version)

General Tso's chicken (pronounced [tswò]) is a sweet, piquant, deep-fried chicken dish that is served in North American Chinese restaurants. (It is also seen with other variants, such as General Tse's chicken or General Gau's chicken.) The dish is named after Zuo Zongtang (formerly romanized Tso Tsung-t'ang), a Qing dynasty statesman and military leader, although there is no recorded connection to him nor is the dish known in Hunan, Zuo's home province.

The food has been associated with Zuo Zongtang (Tso Tsung-t'ang) (1812–1885), a Qing dynasty statesman and military leader from Hunan Province. Zuo himself could not have eaten the dish as it is today, and the dish is found neither in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, nor in Xiangyin County, where Zuo was born. Moreover, Zuo's descendants, who are still living in Xiangyin County, when interviewed, say that they have never heard of such a dish.

There are several stories concerning the origin of the dish. Eileen Yin-Fei Lo states in her book The Chinese Kitchen that the dish originates from a simple Hunan chicken dish, and that the reference to "Zongtang" was not a reference to Zuo Zongtang's given name, but rather a reference to the homonym "zongtang", meaning "ancestral meeting hall". Consistent with this interpretation, the dish name is sometimes (but considerably less commonly) found in Chinese as "Zuo ancestral hall chicken". (Chung tong gai is a transliteration of "ancestral meeting hall chicken" from Cantonese; Zuǒ Zōngtáng jī is the standard name of General Tso's chicken as transliterated from Mandarin.)

The dish or its variants are known by a number of names, including Governor Tso's chicken, General Gao's/Gau's chicken, General Mao's chicken, General Tsao's chicken, General Tong's chicken, General Tang's chicken, General Cho's chicken, General Chai's chicken, General Joe's Chicken, T.S.O. Chicken, General Ching's chicken, General Jong's Chicken, House Chicken, or simply General's Chicken. The linguist Victor Mair, commenting on the various names for the dish and problem of getting them straight, says that he has not seen the spelling "General Zuo's Chicken", that is, using the now standard pinyin romanization, but that he expects to see it soon.