Articles
The fortune cookie is not Chinese
It is probably Japanese, it is definitely American, and in 1983 a San Francisco courtroom held a mock trial to decide who invented it.
Order Chinese food in the United States and the meal ends with a folded wafer containing a slip of paper. It is so fixed a part of the experience that its absence would be noticed. It is also almost entirely absent from China, where diners encountering one for the first time have reasonably asked whether the paper is meant to be eaten.
The Japanese trail
The best evidence points to Japan. Outside Kyoto there is a tradition of tsujiura senbei — "fortune crackers" — folded wafers with a paper fortune tucked into the fold, sold near temples and shrines. They are larger than the American cookie, darker, and flavoured with sesame and miso rather than vanilla and butter, but the shape is unmistakably the same and the fold is identical.
The researcher Yasuko Nakamachi spent years tracing this and turned up nineteenth-century Japanese illustrations showing the crackers being made in exactly the way they are made now — the wafer folded over a rod while still warm. That predates every American claim by decades. Small family bakeries near Kyoto still produce them by hand.
The American argument
How the cracker became the cookie is where it gets contested, and the contest is between two cities.
San Francisco. Makoto Hagiwara ran the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park in the early 1900s and is said to have served a version to visitors around 1914, made by a local confectioner. That would make the American fortune cookie a Japanese immigrant's adaptation, served in a Japanese garden, to a mostly American public.
Los Angeles. David Jung, who founded the Hong Kong Noodle Company, is credited with producing them around 1918 — in one telling, handing them out free to unemployed men, each carrying a scriptural verse of encouragement.
The trial
In 1983 the dispute was settled, after a fashion. San Francisco's Court of Historical Review — a mock court that took up genuinely disputed questions with real judges and no legal authority whatsoever — heard the case. Evidence was presented on both sides. The court found for San Francisco.
Los Angeles was unimpressed, noting that the proceedings had been held in San Francisco, before a San Francisco judge. The verdict settled nothing and the claim is still disputed, which is arguably the correct outcome for a question about the origins of a dessert.
How it became Chinese
The turn is not funny. Before the Second World War, fortune cookies in California were largely made by Japanese-American bakers. After Pearl Harbor, Japanese-Americans on the West Coast were forcibly removed to internment camps, and those businesses closed.
Chinese-American manufacturers stepped into the gap and kept producing them. When the war ended, servicemen returning from the Pacific had encountered the cookie in Chinese restaurants in California, asked for it elsewhere, and the association became permanent. A Japanese confection became a Chinese-American restaurant fixture because of an act of mass incarceration — the kind of detail that gets left out when the cookie is described as a charming tradition.
The industrialisation followed. Automated folding machines replaced hand-folding in the 1960s, and production moved to a scale of billions a year. The largest manufacturer, Wonton Food in New York, has at times run at four million cookies a day.
The night the fortunes won
On 30 March 2005, the Powerball drawing produced an unusual result: 110 people across the country matched five numbers and claimed second prize. Lottery officials assumed fraud, because the expected number of second-prize winners in a typical drawing is a handful.
The investigation found no fraud. It found fortune cookies. Winner after winner had played numbers printed on a slip from a cookie, and the slips traced back to the same manufacturer, which printed a limited set of number combinations across millions of cookies. Enough people had eaten the same fortune, kept the numbers, and played them.
The payout ran to about nineteen million dollars. Nobody won the jackpot — the cookie's Powerball number was wrong — which means the slip that made a hundred and ten people several thousand dollars richer was, strictly speaking, still incorrect.
Coming full circle
In the 1990s an attempt was made to sell fortune cookies in Hong Kong. They were marketed as "genuine American fortune cookies." The venture did not do well.
Which leaves the fortune cookie as a Japanese invention, adapted by Japanese immigrants in California, taken over by Chinese-American bakers during a wartime injustice, sold worldwide as a Chinese tradition, and finally exported to Asia as an American novelty. Whatever is written on the slip, the cookie itself has the better story.