The curious history of General Tso's chicken

From Francis Lam and Salon.com:

http://www.salon.com/food/francis_lam/2 ... os_chicken

Thanks for sharing--quite interesting piece about the migration and transformation of a dish.

I find many, if not most, journalists less appealing than terrorists. The article linked to here is a rip-off of material researched and published by Fuchsia Dunlop and, though this piece's author mentions Dunlop's work, he does so only in passing, half-way into the discussion; not at all does he bother to indicate how much of the material -- most of it, really -- is actually from Dunlop. What a disgrace... even the title of this article is a rip-off.

If you want to learn about this stuff, read Fuchsia's article The Strange Tale of General Tso's Chicken in Authenticity in the Kitchen. Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2005 (R. Hoskings (ed.), Prospect Books) and her book Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook. Her work is always carefully researched and beautifully written.

Really despicable that this person presents the material as if it's his own...

Antonius

Antonius wrote:Really despicable that this person presents the material as if it's his own...

You'll appreciate this Malcolm Gladwell column (originally appeared in the Nov. 22, 2004 New Yorker). I came across it recently in his new "best of..." collection.

Antonius wrote:I find many, if not most, journalists less appealing than terrorists. The article linked to here is a rip-off of material researched and published by Fuchsia Dunlop and, though this piece's author mentions Dunlop's work, he does so only in passing, half-way into the discussion; not at all does he bother to indicate how much of the material -- most of it, really -- is actually from Dunlop. What a disgrace... even the title of this article is a rip-off.

If you want to learn about this stuff, read Fuchsia's article The Strange Tale of General Tso's Chicken in Authenticity in the Kitchen. Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2005 (R. Hoskings (ed.), Prospect Books) and her book Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook. Her work is always carefully researched and beautifully written.

Really despicable that this person presents the material as if it's his own...

Antonius

They call this plagiarism where I come from. I guess it's pointless to ask where the Salon.com editors were...

Francis Lam is actually a former Gourmet writer who just launched the new Salon Food section. You might be interested in reading Fuschia Dunlop's blog post on his article:
http://www.fuchsiadunlop.com/general-ts ... ken-again/

I don't know much about the chicken dish or the supposed plagiarism, but one this is clear from all of this: food writers have some of the strangest names.

‘The Search for General Tso’, A Documentary About Americanized Chinese Food