What do you think of this fact?
After a meal at a Chinese restaurant, the fortune cookie just sort of belongs. Except: the cookie originally has little to do with China. Its roots are in Japan, and it grew up in California.
A trail to Kyoto
A Japanese researcher went looking for answers. According to Smithsonian Magazine, near a Shinto shrine outside Kyoto she found family bakeries that have been making “tsujiura senbei”, roughly “fortune crackers”, for generations. They’re bigger and browner than the version you know, flavored with sesame and miso. The fortune isn’t tucked inside but wedged into the fold on the outside.
According to Smithsonian Magazine, a Japanese woodblock print from 1878 already shows a baker making these cookies by hand on a grill.
From San Francisco to the world
The cookie came to America with Japanese immigrants. According to the National Museum of American History, Suyeichi Okamura founded the Benkyodo confectionery in San Francisco in 1906. It supplied fortune cookies to the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, baked with special hand molds.
Then came World War II. Japanese Americans in California were sent to internment camps, and many Japanese bakeries had to close. Chinese entrepreneurs filled the gap, made their own fortune cookies and sold them to Chinese restaurants. That connection stuck, and the cookie became known around the world as “Chinese”.
According to Smithsonian Magazine, a judge ruled in a 1983 court battle over its origins that the modern fortune cookie was born in pre-World War I San Francisco.
A cookie with an identity crisis
Exactly who baked the very first fortune cookie in America is still disputed. Only the rough route is clear: from Japan to California to Chinese restaurants worldwide.
The fortune in your cookie has traveled a lot farther than you did to get dinner.