The inventor of General Tso’s Chicken and founder of famous Taiwanese Hunan-style restaurant chain Peng’s Garden died in Taipei on Wednesday.
Taiwan News: Chef Peng Chang-kuei (彭長貴), the founder of the famous Hunan-style restaurant chain Peng’s Garden Hunan Restaurant (彭園湘菜館) and inventor of the world famous Chinese dish General Tso’s Chicken, died on Nov. 30 at the age of 98 from Pneumonia.
A native of Changsha, Hunan Province, Peng began training at the age of 13 under the tutelage of the famous Hunan chef Cao Jing-chen (曹藎臣), who was the family chef of Tan Yan-kai (譚延闓), the prime minister of the Nationalist government from 1926 to 1928. After WWII, he was put in charge of running Nationalist government banquets, and in 1949 he fled to Taiwan after the Kuomintang’s forces were defeated by the communists in the Chinese Civil War.
According to an interview with the China Times, Peng says that his most famous dish was created in 1952 during a four-day visit by U.S. Seventh Fleet commander Admiral Arthur W. Radford. After three days, he had served the guests most of his repertoire of dishes, so to try and mix things up a bit, he decided to chop some chicken into big chunks, fry it to a golden hue and then added a different combination of sauce and seasoning to create a new dish. read more
Damn! First the inventor of the Big Mac, and now this?
Why do people that EAT food die earlier?
So, a Big Mac and a General Tso were all going down the road at a fair pace and came to the fork in the road….who gets the fork?…
Never really had a taste for General Tso’s Chicken.
Loved two all beef patties, special sauce on a sesame seed seed bun.
RIP to both culinary innovators.
The Chinese place local to me advertises as “New York Style”
It’s gross, I would much rather have Chinese style Chinese food.
So who’s the third to go..
Please not Chef Boyardee
I could not bear it.
Fierce warrior…
Has chicken dish named for him
http://tinyurl.com/jywwxzy
I’m going to be hungry in an hour after reading this.
Just as long as we don’t lose the inventor of “MadDog 2020” as #3 in the string of deaths.
The guy was a genius. I get his wonderful creation a couple of times a month. Absolutely love it.
Always disturbed me seeing restaurant signs that say Hunan Cuisine. You know Engrish dot com. All it takes is just one misspelled letter.