Fortune Cookies – Made In America
Anyone who has ever eaten at a Chinese or Japanese restaurant is familiar with the fortune cookie. Because we encounter them almost exclusively at Asian restaurants, many assume that they are an ancient tradition from that continent. On the contrary, they are only about 100 years old and they were first created in America.
There is some question as to the exact history of the fortune cookie. The only thing we are certain of is that they appeared first in California sometime around 1900. Beyond that little is known for certain.
Some believe that a man named Mokota Hagiwara deserves credit for their invention. The story goes that in 1914, after suffering through several years of bad luck, Mokota wanted a creative way to thank those who had stood by him through it all. He came up with the idea of baking cookies with thank you notes hidden in them. The cookies were well received and soon were being served at San Francisco’s Japanese Tea Garden.
Others believe the cookies were invented by a Chinese immigrant named David Jung. As the founder of the world famous Hong Kong Noodle Company, David Jung was a very wealthy man. While traveling around his hometown of Los Angeles he was discouraged by the poor and homeless people he saw there. Wanting to encourage these people in some way David talked to a local minister. This minister wrote him a number of passages that he felt would inspire the poor and give them hope. David then took those words of wisdom and baked them into cookies which he handed out to the poor.
It really doesn’t matter who actually invented the fortune cookie. What does matter is that everyone who had one wanted more. Demand for these crispy cookies with their hidden nuggets of wisdom grew very rapidly. Soon it was clear that folding each cookie individually with chopsticks was not an efficient enough process. In 1964, Edward Louie did the Lotus Fortune Cookie Company a great favor by creating a machine that did all the folding for them. Once perfected this machine was capable of mass producing fortune cookies. Now they were readily available and it didn’t take long before they were regularly served at most Asian restaurants.
Regardless of the actual origin of the fortune cookie, it is clear that they are, in fact, an American, not Asian, tradition. They were not even introduced to the people of China until the 1990s. In a funny twist, today they are marketed in China with the motto, “Genuine American Fortune Cookies”.
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