Fortune Cookies – An American Tradition

Fortune cookies are a mainstay at Asian restaurants. Every time you finish a meal they appear. Crispy little cookies with messages tucked inside. Many Americans assume that they are originated in Asia but they are wrong. Fortune cookies are an American tradition.

There is much debate as to the actual origin of these crispy little cookies. What is clear is that they were first made in California in the early 1900s. After that the details are up for debate.

One school of thought says that they were first made by a Japanese immigrant named Mokota Hagiwara in 1914. Apparently Hagiwara had suffered a run of bad luck. When he recovered he wanted to find a way to thank those who had helped him along the way. He wrote tiny thank you notes and folded them carefully into cookies. When he removed them from the oven, the fortune cookie had been born. He gave them to his friends who were very pleased with them. Soon he was serving them at the 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.

What all can agree on is that once the concept of placing messages into a cookie was invented, it rapidly became very popular. Very soon large numbers of bakery employees were spending their days folding these cookies and placing fortunes inside of them. By 1964 these cookies had become so popular that it was next to impossible for the demand to be met. An employee of the Lotus Fortune Cookie Company named Edward Louie invented a machine that folded and stuffed the cookies. Once these cookies could be mass produced they became even more common and soon were a mainstay of every Asian restaurant.

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”.