Renowned chef, creator of General Tso’s chicken

Peng Chang-kuei, a vaunted Hunanese chef who was widely credited as the creator of General Tso’s chicken, a dish that evolved into the deep-fried, sticky and unabashedly inauthentic staple of the American Chinese takeout joint, died Nov. 30 at a hospital in Taipei, Taiwan. He was 97.

The cause was a lung infection, said his son Chuck Peng. Once the chef to the Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, Mr. Peng was one of the pre-eminent cooks of his generation.

He fled mainland China after the Communist Revolution of 1949 and settled in Taiwan, where he sought to uphold the traditions of his native Hunan Province.

Those traditions included no such dish as General Tso’s chicken, despite its modern reputation outside China as a regional classic.

Mr. Peng said he devised the recipe for a banquet in the 1950s. He named it in honor of Zuo Zongtang, a celebrated Hunanese general of the 19th century who helped crush the Taiping Rebellion, an uprising that cost tens of millions of lives.

As it was conceived, General Tso’s chicken bore little similarity to the dish known to Americans. The modern iteration is “sweet, it’s fried and it’s chicken, which are all things that Americans love,” journalist and author Jennifer 8. Lee said.