Fortune Cookies

Walk into any Chinese restaurant in America and you will cleanse your palate and finish your meal with a fortune cookie. These simple biscuits folded into a moon shape with a slip of paper inside have become popular in all American and Canadian Chinese restaurants. Ironically enough, the origin of the fortune cookie is not in China. Different stories predict where this Chinese dessert came from.

The fortune cookie as we know it today originated in America. One story recounts the creation of the fortune cookie when Chinese men were settling in the area between California and Nevada laying railways. Workers had few pleasures during this hard time except these small biscuits to exchange with one another during the Chinese Moon Festival. Traditional Lotus Moon Cakes were traded during this celebration, but all the settlers had were these biscuits filled with good luck messages. Thus the fortune cookie was born.

Another story recounts a local baker in Los Angeles. Around 1920 David Jung began making these cookies filled with words of encouragement to hand out to the poor and homeless. He eventually founded the Hong Kong Noodle Company.

Los Angeles cannot take the claim so quickly because San Francisco also has a claim on the creation of fortune cookies. In 1907 Makota Hagiwara, a caretaker of a Japanese Tea Garden, created these cookies as well bearing thank you notes. These cookies helped him with a dispute against the mayor and in 1915 his invention was displayed at the Panama Convention.

These small cookies were originally made by hand through the talented work of chopsticks. In 1964 San Francisco's Lotus Fortune Cookie Company created a machine to make the cookies and slip tiny fortunes in them. However, currently the largest fortune cookie company is the Wonton Food Inc. of Long Island City, and this plant distributes 60 millions cookies per month. Now that is a lot of good luck to go around.