General Tso's is battered fried chicken pieces in a sweet, dark, chilli-tinged soy glaze, the Chinese American takeout default. Invented in New York City restaurants in the early 1970s.

Chef Peng Chang-kuei, a Hunan-born refugee in Taiwan in the 1950s, devised the original General Tso's as a savoury Hunan-style dish. T.T. Wang adapted it for New York palates at Shun Lee Palace on East 55th Street in 1972, sweetening the sauce and battering the chicken in the heavy American style. Hunan-born chef Tsung Ting Wang at Hunam Restaurant followed weeks later. Within a decade the dish had displaced chop suey as the unofficial Chinese American national order. The dish is named for Zuo Zongtang, a 19th-century Qing-dynasty general from Hunan, who almost certainly never ate anything resembling it.

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