The 3rd Annual Food and Farm Film Festival, a fundraiser for 18 Reason’s cooking classes in low-income communities, came to a crispy but cool conclusion Sunday night showing “The Search for General Tso” paired with General Tso’s Chicken courtesy of Mister Jiu’s.
For a General Tso’s Chicken addict, the combo was irresistible. Before collapsing from all those calories, all those carbs, I might finally find out if General Tso actually existed and how the famous dish came to bear his name.
Spoiler alert: There was a real General Tso. He had nothing to do with the development of General Tso’s Chicken and was not a noted chicken eater. A fifth generation grandson, interviewed in the film, laments his ancestor is better known for his association with a food he did not eat, rather than his substantial military and political accomplishments. Welcome to America General.
Or is it Chimerica?
The ubiquity of General Tso’s chicken in the United States, from the sublime to the ridiculous, is a marvelous story of the intersection, interpenetration, ironies and unintended consequences of the ongoing Chinese and American cultural collision. The film, as light as the dish’s sauce is heavy, presents a multi-layered look at American food culture through the lens of the Chinese-American immigrant experience. Well worth seeing.
As we all know, Bi-Rite and 18 Reasons, the festival’s sponsors, are totally into healthy sustainable, local organic etc. food. In contrast, the General’s chicken is one of the more unhealthy meals on a standard Chinese menu and was rated a few years ago among the top ten unhealthy meals in America.
Think of it: deep fat fried chicken nuggets drowned in a thick velvety sauce loaded with sugar and salt. The calorie count on the average is 1300 per dish (half the calories you need for a day) and the sodium count around 3200 milligrams (40% more than recommended). Add to that 11 grams of unsaturated fat, and you get the picture.
Any doubt why the dish is so popular among American eaters? “Comfort food” we call it.
The film does not get into current attempts to negate the negative health affects. I got the impression the General may look kindly upon the new dishes coming on line which also bear his name (though the General was reportedly an anti-Western nationalist, so arteriosclerosis may have been his strategy all along).
As noted, the film came with a serving of the General’s chicken compliments of Mister Jiu, opening this summer in Chinatown. No doubt the festival organizers felt Mister Jiu, promising to use only local, organic, sustainable ingredients, would provide a version of the dish more in keeping with contemporary Mission food values.
True enough, Mister Jiu’s chicken, succulent on the inside, had not been swimming in sauce all day so was still crispy on the outside (seemed a bit like cheating since maintaining the crisp in a vat of sauce is part of the art). The sauce, not velvety, was sweet and light, which was fine, but was not very spicy. Unfortunate.
The dish features and relies to some extent on the heat. In Hunan Province in winter or in San Francisco on cold foggy nights like Sunday, heat is key.
The Mission is probably not the go-to neighborhood for General Tso’s chicken in San Francisco. We do have Mission Chinese with it’s General Tso’s Veal Rib (maybe a dish closer to something the General would have eaten), but no place stands out, like Tai Chi in Polk Gulch, or Yan’s Kitchen downtown.
Locally I go to Wild Pepper at 26th and San Jose. They serve a commendable version, though a little too sweet and thickly breaded. It comes with broccoli, which invariably tastes, and looks, like cardboard. But then who orders General Tso’s Chicken for the broccoli?