The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (11 page)

Periodical y a fervor erupts over whether or not Chinese food is healthful. The Center for Science in the Public Interest shocked the Chinese-restaurant industry in 1993 when it published a study saying that many Chinese dishes, like kung pao chicken and egg rol s, were high in fat and sodium. But Chinese food, cooked in a Chinese style for Chinese taste buds, is actual y relatively healthy: lots of vegetables and seafood and low in sodium, with few deep-fried ingredients. The problem is that most Americans prefer American-style Chinese food to the real thing.

How did General Tso’s chicken come to be?

It seemed America must have had a hand in it.

Chinese food in China is a diverse lot, but once it came to the United States it developed a few central characteristics.

First of al : Chinese restaurants in America tend to shy away from anything that is recognizably animal. Mainstream Americans don’t like to be reminded that the food on their plate once lived, breathed, swam, or walked. That means nothing with eyebal s. No appendages or extremities (no tongues, no feet, no claws, no ears). Secondly, opacity. That means nothing transparent or even semitransparent (this eliminates certain kinds of fungus and al jel yfish). There is also a limit to the textures Americans wil al ow in their mouths: nothing rubbery or oddly gelatinous (no tripe and, again, no jel yfish or sea cucumber). There is also an acceptable color palate. Nothing organic should be too black (no black seaweed or black mushrooms). Nothing made with flour should be too white (steamed white buns have the undone look of the Pil sbury Doughboy; toasty brown is better).

But perhaps most important in American eating is the idea that what goes into the mouth should never come out. That is, there should be nothing where you have to chew on something and then spit out an inedible part. This means no chicken feet, no fish with bones, no shrimp with shel s.

Peanuts come shel ed, and even watermelon is preferred seedless.

In China, however, the aftermath of most restaurant meals is a pile of bones, shel s, and other detritus on the table at every place setting: the casualties of a personal battle between the diner and the items on the plate. In particular, much of the debris is due to the Chinese love of seafood, and the love of that seafood in its God-created entirety. Chinese buy their fish whole. When she was in America, my friend Wei bemoaned the difficulty of getting a whole fish.

“They cut it up into these clean little pieces,” she said.

“If fish doesn’t have bones, it’s not tasty.” And shrimp?

My friends like to eat their shrimp with the eyes and tails stil on. You can tel if a shrimp was cooked dead or alive by how the tail splits.

The meat nearest the bone is the most tender and most flavorful. So Chinese people like chicken feet and legs (lots of bones) and are confounded by Americans’ preference for chicken breast (boneless and bland). Fol owing the law that says something is worth only as much as someone is wil ing to pay for it, in China, the tender feet and legs are the most expensive part of the chicken; in America, they are almost worthless. This creates arbitrage opportunities to buy low and sel high. A Chinese customs official confided over dinner in Changsha one night that one of the biggest, most frequent il egal exports from the United States to China is chicken feet—along with pigs’ ears, cows’

stomach,

and

assorted

other

animal

parts.

International rings of organized smugglers bring the goods into Hong Kong, and then over the border on slow boats to China. “They wait until the middle of the night and sneak in,” he explained to me. “It goes up during New Year’s, when demand is greater.”

Officials have intercepted as many as ten ships a night, each carrying tons of animal products.

In two separate incidents in 2006, lumbering ships crashed into shore, strewing thousands of pounds of chicken and pork parts along the sandy beaches and rocky headlands.

Why do the Chinese mine so much of an animal’s body? The original Chinese food philosophy is one designed for shortage and storage, as the food historian E. N. Anderson noted in
The Food of China
.

Despite the opulent images of the country’s emperors, much of China was traditional y poor, so everything on an animal was eaten: ears, feet, tongue, intestines, liver. Since refrigeration did not exist for much of Chinese culinary history, food had to be dried or pickled to make it through the winter. With cooking fuel scarce, stir-frying was a popular technique because it used little oil and consumed energy efficiently. Many of General Tso’s family stil burn dried branches for their woks, a device that, with its rounded bottom, evenly distributes high heat along its surface. In contrast, the Chinese historical y had little use for baking, one of the least energy-efficient ways of cooking. American Chinese food developed under few such constraints. Refrigeration aided a fundamental shift in the American diet. Oil, necessary for deep-frying, was readily available. Refined sugar was easily accessible. Meat, much demanded and made plentiful by our agricultural-industrial complex, has become incredibly cheap by historical standards.

Americans like chicken, sweetness, and deep-frying.

These three desires converged in General Tso’s chicken.

I final y found a promising lead in my hunt for the general’s chicken in Changsha: Tang Keyuan, the general manager of the Xinchangfu Restaurant, who had been in the hospitality business for over two decades.

I first showed him a picture of corpulent pieces of General Tso’s chicken laid on a bed of broccoli. He squinted. “Is that oxtail?”

No, it’s chicken, I said. It’s a dish in America cal ed General Tso’s chicken—
Zuo Zong ji
—which is exceptional y famous.

His eyes lit up. “Ah!
Zuo Zongtang tuji!
” he said, using the long form of the translation of “General Tso’s chicken.” My heart skipped a beat. Final y, I’d found someone in Hunan who knew of the dish!

“But that is not how you make it,” he sniffed.

“It’s total y different. The pieces are too big. You have to cut the pieces of chicken smal er.

“My brother knows how to make this dish,”

he added.

Where had he learned of it?

He thought. The dish had been introduced in Changsha by a Chef Peng in the 1990s. (The 1990s?

I thought. That’s more than a decade after the dish had already made the greatest-hits list in America.) Chef Peng had featured the dish when he opened up the Peng Yuan restaurant in Changsha’s Great Wal Hotel. But the restaurant hadn’t lasted.

Why had it closed down? I inquired.

“It didn’t keep up with the market.” He paused. “He didn’t innovate enough.”

Was Chef Peng even stil alive?

Four men had helped redefine American cuisine in the early 1970s. Three of them were Chinese culinary greats who worked out of New York City; the fourth was Richard Nixon, whose historic state visit to China in 1972, the first since the Communists had taken over the mainland, sparked an instant frenzy for al things Chinese. Suddenly, Americans learned that there was much more to Chinese food than chop suey and chow mein. A Chinese restaurateur who has owned more than twenty restaurants in Louisiana told me, “Lines formed overnight.”

The three China chefs had much in common.

As youngsters, they were classical y trained in kitchens in mainland China. When the Communists took over the mainland, they fled to Taiwan. After a few decades in Taiwan, they ventured to the United States. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, they began opening restaurants in New York City. Chef Peng opened Peng Yuan on the East Side. Chef T. T.

Wang opened Hunam and the different Shun Lees.

Wen Dah Tai, also known as Uncle Tai, joined forces with David Keh and opened Uncle Tai’s Hunan Yuan on Third Avenue and Sixty-second Street. As they innovated and introduced new dishes, the American media fawned over them. But even though Henry Kissinger loved Peng Yuan, Chef Peng closed it down and moved back to Taiwan in the early 1980s.

Owning a restaurant in America was too stressful.

Both Uncle Tai and Chef Wang had passed away. A friend helped me locate the number for Peng Yuan restaurant in Taipei. I cal ed and held my breath.

The woman who picked up the phone got the manager, Chuck Peng, Chef Peng’s son. Yes, he said in mel ifluous English, they served General Tso’s chicken there. And yes, his father was stil alive, though mostly retired. At that moment I had to taste that chicken.

I flew into Taipei on a Friday morning and made my way to the newest Peng Yuan, in the eastern part of the city—a sleek, modern restaurant on the fifth floor of a newly constructed high-rise. Chuck Peng joked, “If General Tso’s chicken had been patented, my father would have prospered.” He ordered a smal plate of General Tso’s chicken for me. A sweet-faced waitress arrived carrying the dish.

There it was! General Tso’s chicken! In the flesh! Big chunks of chicken drenched in a rich, caramelized brown sauce, with chili peppers seductively tucked in between the pieces. It even had a sprig of decorative broccoli.

I took a breath. At last, the original General Tso’s chicken.

Disappointment soon fol owed. First, the

“broccoli” was not broccoli at al , but some kind of flimsy decorative herb that also happened to have florets. It was like looking behind stage scenery and realizing that the castles and trees were al flat.

I picked up a piece of chicken and examined it. The thick sauce had disguised the fact that the chicken stil had the skin on it.

Skin?

I took a bite. The dominant flavor was soy sauce. That was fol owed by chopped garlic and a kick from spicy chili peppers. The chicken was appropriately chewy, but there was no crispy, fried-batter coating.

Where was the sweetness? The tanginess?

Instead, it had a strong salty flavor.

It was good. And it was chicken. It just wasn’t General Tso’s. Or at least not the General Tso’s I had come to know and love.

As we left the restaurant, I glanced at the menu. It listed the dish as “Geojeol Tso’s chicken.”

That may have been the most comforting and familiar part of the meal.

If this was the original General Tso’s chicken, where had the sweetness and crispy coating come from?

The answer, perhaps, lay back at home: New York City. Over lunch at Shun Lee, which had survived past the glamorous 1970s Chinese-cuisine era, Michael Tong recal ed a little friendly chicken-general rivalry between his partner, Chef Wang, and Chef Peng back when Hunan cuisine was becoming popular.

“I think there was a lot of so-cal ed competition between the chefs,” said Michael.

Before Chef Wang opened Hunam in 1972, he and Michael had visited Hong Kong and Taiwan, where they’d been inspired by the General Tso’s chicken dish at Chef Peng’s restaurant in Taipei.

(When Michael said that, I knew I was getting closer: this was two decades before Peng had opened his restaurant in the Great Wal Hotel.) In response, Chef Wang had created his own general’s chicken dish, but with an American twist, Michael told me. “Once you are serving the American public, you change the texture,” he said. The key, he added, was to crispy-coat things. Chef Wang used that concept on several dishes in that era, including Hunan beef and Lake Tungting shrimp. But ultimately it would be the chicken that would real y capture America’s popular imagination.

Chef Wang needed a name for his chicken dish. “We al wanted to use the name of a renowned general from Hunan in the Qing Dynasty,” said Michael. But one esteemed general was already taken. “The idea is that one guy used Zuo Zongtang.

The other wanted to use another general, General Zeng Guofan.” The very same General Zeng who had been our General Tso’s mentor.

So in this great man’s honor, Chef Wang introduced General Ching’s chicken—another Hunan chicken dish in tribute to a Qing Dynasty military leader. (How Zeng, also spel ed Tseng, became Ching is another one of those mysteries of Chinese-English transliterations.)

Which means that today, according to Michael Tong, the dish we are eating is actual y closer to General Ching’s chicken.

So what happened to General Ching? Why was he vanquished by his former protégé and his chicken recipe stolen?

General Ching’s chicken did conquer some territory beyond Hunam in the late 1970s, with a few scattered appearances on other restaurant menus, but he never seemed to establish a beachhead.

Today his name is rarely mentioned. In contrast, General Tso’s ubiquity is likely due to his embrace of modern technology: television. Al great military men know that in the modern age, war is fought in the media as wel on the battlefields.

In 1974, the local ABC news station in New York did a segment on Chef Peng’s restaurant.

Reporter Bob Lape, the Eyewitness Gourmet, visited Chef Peng in his kitchen and taped the making of General Tso’s chicken. After the segment ran, about fifteen hundred people wrote in and asked for the recipe, Mr. Lape remembered. “It was a serenade to the mouth. It’s that kind of dish. It’s a one-time instant love affair.”