A couple of days ago, Claire brought home a box of fortune cookies — in preparation for our annual Chinese New Year celebration. I looked at the box and while just about everything we have in our house was made in China, the fortune cookies were not.
Well, since I don’t have anything better to do today and I know there is a lot of interest — and mis-information — surrounding fortune cookies, I thought that might be a good topic for today.
Often times when you go to a restaurant, when the check comes, the restaurants also give you a “treat,” like mints or maybe a small piece of chocolate. But in most Chinese restaurants — in the United States — you get a fortune cookie. Most people associate the fortune cookie with Chinese restaurants, and many/most believe they stem from Chinese culture. But — as you’ve probably already guessed, the fortune cookie is not a Chinese invention. Their origin can be traced back to 19th-century Japan and 20th-century America.
As you might imagine with a controversial subject like fortune cookies, there are many theories and a lot of speculation surrounding its mysterious origin. Discussions about the cookie’s origin became so heated that in 1983 there was a mock trial held in San Francisco’s pseudo-legal Court of Historical Review to determine the origin(s) of the fortune cookie. There were at least five cases presented to prove the “origin” of the fortune cookie during the trial — but as far as I can tell, there was no clear winner.
One of the most often repeated origin stories of the American fortune cookie cites the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park as the first known U.S. restaurant to serve the cookies. The Tea Garden sourced their cookies from a local bakery called Benkyodo, which claims to have pioneered the vanilla and butter flavoring and to have invented a machine, sometime around 1911, to mass-produce the cookies. But several other sources have also claimed to invent the cookie around the same time — including three Los Angeles-based immigrant run businesses: Fugetsu-Do Confectionary in the city’s Little Tokyo, Japanese snack manufacturer Umeya and the Hong Kong Noodle Company.
By all accounts, it appears that fortune cookies probably originated in Japanese bakeries. So how did they make the move to Chinese restaurants? Again, no one knows for sure, but there are a few theories….
Japanese immigrants to the U.S. around the turn of the 20th couldn’t/didn’t open Japanese restaurants because Americans didn’t want to eat raw fish. So, in many cases, they actually opened Chinese restaurants. And Americans expectation for dessert at the end of meals may explain why many of those restaurants began to offer fortune cookies.
When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and President Franklin Roosevelt ordered the relocation and internment of Japanese Americans, Japanese businesses began to close — including the bakeries that made fortune cookies. That opened the door for Chinese American entrepreneurs to produce and sell the cookies.
So after World War II, fortune cookies became common in Chinese Restaurants. Some people like the taste of fortune cookies, some don’t, but just about everyone likes the fortunes. Some of the early fortunes featured Biblical sayings and quotes from Confucius, Aesop, Ben Franklin, etc. Later, fortunes included recommended lottery numbers, smiley faces, jokes and sage advice….
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