Tonights main course is a firm favourote in the west whose origins are disputed.


General Tso's chicken 

Chef Hannah prepared to dish with great style using the Enchanted Wok of North Norway brought back by the great aeronautical explorer , Leve Randy ( who is neither British or Caledonian).

General Tso's chicken (pronounced [tswò]) is a sweet deep-fried chicken dish that is served in North American Chinese restaurants. The dish is named after Zuo Zongtang (also 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.


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The recipe has now been immortalised by the BCC as follows:

https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/general-tsos-chicken


Possible Origins

The dish has been associated with Zuo Zongtang (Tso Tsung-t'ang) (1812–1885), a Qing dynasty statesman and military leader from Hunan Province, but Zuo could not have eaten the dish or known of it.[3] 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.[4]


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(宗堂)", meaning "ancestral meeting hall".[5] Consistent with this interpretation, the dish name is sometimes (but considerably less commonly) found in Chinese as 左宗棠雞 (Chung tong gai is transliterated from Jyutping[citation needed]; Zuǒ Zōngtáng jī is transliterated from Hanyu Pinyin).