The fortune cookies you enjoy after your Chinese meal don’t have the origins you might have imagined. To begin with, they were not invented in China and then, there is more than one manufacturer in the United States that claims to have created them for the first time, however, their origin would be older.
Yasuko Nakamachi, a researcher at the University of Kanagawa almost certainly says that fortune cookies were created in Japan, according to a New York Times article.
In the late 1990s, he looked outside of Kyoto, he saw that shape familiar to fortune cookies at a family-owned bakery called Sohonke Hogyokudo. The family has owned it for three generations and they point out that the cookie tradition already existed.
The Japanese bakery has used the same 23 fortunes for decades . In contrast, one of the manufacturers in the United States, Wonton Food, has a database of more than 10,000 fortunes. Like the Sohonke Hogyokudo bakery, there are others in nearby places and they have some differences with those of the United States.
The Japanese cookies are bigger and brown because its mass contains sesame and miso rather than vanilla and butter. The paper is tucked into the crease of the cookie and not into the body.
In a storybook from the 19th century
One of the proofs of the Japanese origin of the cookies that Nakamachi found is an illustration from a storybook dated 1878, “Moshiogusa Kinsei Kidan.” In the book, an apprentice is making tsujiura senbei, or “fortune cookies.”
So cookies appeared in Japan nearly 30 years before Japanese and Chinese immigrants in California claimed to have invented them between 1907 and 1914.
The immigrants who claim to have created the cookie
Suyeichi Okamura , an immigrant from Japan who founded Benkyodo in San Francisco and noted that he first made the Japanese cookie in the United States.
David Jung , a Chinese immigrant, founder of the Hong Kong Noodle Company in Los Angeles, claimed to have invented the fortune cookie just before World War I.
In the story shared by Eat This Not That, Jung gave out the cookies to the poor for free and placed a strip of paper with a biblical scripture on it.
Seiichi Kito, founder of Fugetsu-do in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo, also claimed to have invented the fortune cookie in the early 1900s.
How did it become a dessert in Chinese restaurants?
Researcher Nakamachi believes that Chinese manufacturers began taking over fortune cookie production during World War II, when Japanese bakeries closed as Japanese Americans were detained and sent to internment camps.
While in Japan small bakeries still make them in a traditional way. In the United States they are manufactured by the thousands a day with metal fingers to fold the fortune in half to trap it inside the cookie.