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Legendary History of the Fortune Cookie #5
The latest history of the fortune cookie is that it originated in Japan. A wood block image from 1878 shows what seems to be a Japanese street vendor grilling, fortune cookies. They can still be found in certain districts of Kyoto Japan, but are larger and darker than the fortune cookie we are familiar with. They are made with miso paste or sesame and have a savory flavor instead of the sweet, sugar fortune cookie that is readily available in the United States. The fortunes were never put inside the cookies either. Instead, they were tucked into the fold of the fortune cookie on the outside. This may be the earliest fortune cookie to appear in the classic shape.
Regardless of who was the first inventor, it's probable that all of the above theories have some validity.
From Kyoto to California
Women working at the Lotus Chinese Fortune Cookie bakery in San Francisco, c. 1977.
As far back as the 1870s, some confectionary shops near Kyoto, Japan carried a cracker with the same folded shape and a fortune tucked into the bend, instead of its hollow inside. It’s called the “tsujiura senbei,” or “fortune cracker,” according to Jennifer 8. Lee, author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food, which recounts the history of the cookie.
The Japanese cracker, Lee wrote, was larger and darker, made with sesame and miso instead of the vanilla and butter used to flavor fortune cookies found in modern Chinese restaurants in America. Lee cited Japanese researcher Yasuko Nakamachi, who said she found these cookies at a generations-old family bakery near a popular Shinto shrine just outside of Kyoto in the late 1990s. Nakamachi also uncovered storybooks from 1878 with illustrations of an apprentice who worked in a senbei store making the tsujiura senbei, along with other kinds of crackers.
Lee says the fortune cookie likely arrived in the United States along with Japanese immigrants who came to Hawaii and California between the 1880s and early 1900s, after the Chinese Exclusion Act’s expulsion of Chinese workers left a demand for cheap labor. Japanese bakers set up shop in places such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, making miso and sesame-flavored “fortune cookie-ish” crackers, among other treats.
One of the most oft-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 treat. 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, says Lee, 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.
READ MORE: History of San Francisco's Chinatown
Today's Fortune Cookies
Fortune Cookies In Fun Colors & Flavors Make a Unique... And Tasty Treat!
Fortune cookies became common in Chinese restaurants after World War II. While not traditionally part of Chinese cuisine, American customers expected some sort of dessert. So out of necessity, fortune cookies offered Americans something familiar with an exotic flair, while still being economical for the Chinese vendors.
Although some people actually like the texture and flavor of standard restaurant fortune cookies, most people consider the fortune to be the essence of the cookie. Early fortunes featured Biblical sayings, or aphorisms from Confucius, Aesop, or Ben Franklin. Later, fortunes included recommended lottery numbers, smiley faces, jokes, and sage, if hackneyed, advice. Politicians have used them in campaigns, and fortunes have been customized for weddings and birthday parties.
In 1988, Mike Fry invented the concept of fortune cookies in fun flavors and colors and founded Fancy Fortune Cookies®. This was the first gourmet fortune cookie bakery specializing in custom sayings as well as great tasting fortune cookies! Fancy Fortune Cookies now provides fortune cookies in a variety of flavors, colors, and with many options such as, milk chocolate dipped, dark chocolate dipped, white chocolate dipped, with custom messages, and full-color imprinted fortunes.
Since 1988, fortune cookies have become a valuable marketing and direct mail tool used by fortune 500 companies such as, Motorola, FedEx, Apple, Starbucks, MAC, Mariott, Johnson & Johnson, Guess, Ashley Furniture, Sony, Honda, Lilly, Pfizer, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Bank of America, GM, AT&T, Google, Twitter and many more.
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Where did fortune cookies come from—and how did they become so ubiquitous?
It’s customary in many restaurants for diners to receive a small treat with their check: mints, hard candy and sometimes even chocolate. But at many Chinese restaurants around the United States, patrons get something a little different: a Pac-Man-shaped, vanilla-flavored cookie containing a finger-sized slip of paper printed with a pithy fortune or aphorism.
While many Americans associate these fortune cookies with Chinese restaurants—and by extension, Chinese culture—they are actually more readily traceable to 19th-century Japan and 20th-century America.
Legendary History of the Fortune Cookie #4
During the 13th and 14th centuries, China was occupied by Mongols. The story goes that the Mongols had no taste for Lotus Nut Paste. So, the Chinese people hid sayings inscribed with the date of their revolution inside the Moon Cakes where the yolk would typically reside. Under the disguise of a Taoist priest, patriotic revolutionary Chu Yuan Chang, entered occupied walled cities to hand out Moon Cakes to other revolutionaries. These instructions coordinated the uprising that successfully allowed the Chinese people to form the basis of the Ming Dynasty.
Moon Festival became regularly celebrated. Part of that tradition was the passing out of cakes with sayings inside them.
It is thought that this legend is what inspired the Chinese 49ers working on the construction of American Railways through the Sierra Nevada to California. When Moon Festival rolled around, they did not have any traditional moon cakes. So out of necessity they improvised with hard biscuits and the Fortune Cookie was born.
Fortune Cookie History
Legendary History of the Fortune Cookie #1
The Chinese immigrant, David Jung, who founded the Hong Kong Noodle Company while living in Los Angeles, invented the cookie in 1918. Concerned about the poor people he saw wandering near his shop, he created the cookie and passed them out free on the streets. Each cookie contained a strip of paper with an inspirational Bible scripture on it, written for Jung by a Presbyterian minister.
The Mysterious Origin of the Fortune Cookie
Much to most Americans' surprise, the fortune cookie is not a Chinese invention.
Fortune Cookies Actually Originated in California!
It is actually an American invention originating in California. There are many theories, and much speculation surrounding the mysterious origin of the fortune cookie, regarding in which city the fortune cookie originated and who invented it--Chinese-American, Japanese-American or 14th century revolutionists--there has been much debate. In 1983, there was even a mock trial held in San Francisco's pseudo-legal Court of Historical Review to determine the origins of the fortune cookie.
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How did fortune cookies migrate from Japanese bakeries to Chinese restaurants? American food preferences likely played a part.
Japanese emigres to the U.S. around the turn of the 20th century couldn’t open Japanese restaurants, says Lee, because Americans didn’t want to eat raw fish. “So in many cases, they actually opened Chinese restaurants because they were kind of going through a big renaissance with chop suey, chow mein, egg foo young.” And Americans' expectation for dessert at the end of meals, says Lee, may explain why many of these restaurants began to offer fortune cookies with the check.
But the fortune cookie, once produced by Japanese Americans, eventually wound up in the hands of Chinese American manufacturers during World War II. After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941 and President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the relocation and internment of Japanese Americans through his Executive Order 9066, Japanese American businesses began to close, including the bakeries that once made fortune cookies. That gave Chinese American entrepreneurs an opening to produce and sell them.
More than 100 years later, fortune cookies remain a massive business. New York-based Wonton Food, the largest fortune-cookie producer, manufactures more than 4 million of them daily, with an estimated 3 billion cookies produced annually, wrote Lee.
READ MORE: Building the Transcontinental Railroad: How 20,000 Chinese Americans Made it Happen
Legendary History of the Fortune Cookie #3
In the early 1900s a plan was hatched to transform San Francisco's Chinatown from a ghetto into a cute tourist attraction. San Francisco's Chinatown promised tourists a real Oriental experience. The city promoted their Chinese decorations, pageantry and architecture. Supposedly, increased tourism led to the invention of the fortune cookie to fill the void of a dessert item. To fill the tourists' demands for a dessert, a worker in San Francisco's Kay Heong Noodle Factory invented a plain flat cookie in the 1930s. This plain flat cookie, while still warm, was folded around a little piece of paper on which a hand-written prediction or piece of Chinese wisdom would be found.
Legendary History of the Fortune Cookie #2
Others claim a Japanese immigrant, Makoto Hagiwara, invented the fortune cookie in San Francisco. Hagiwara, a designer of the famous Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, was an avid gardener until an anti-Japanese mayor fired him from his job around the turn of the last century. Later a new mayor did reinstate him. In 1914, to show his deep appreciation to friends who had stood by him during his time of hardship, Hagiwara made a cookie and placed a thank you note inside. After passing them out to those who had helped him, he began serving them regularly at the Japanese Tea Garden. In 1915, they were displayed at the Panama-Pacific Exhibition, San Francisco's world fair.
