Interesting Things to Know
Fortune cookies didn’t come from China
The minute you munch the last noodle in the chow mein, you are ready for the final act of Chinese dining, at least in Western-style. That’s right: It’s time for the fortune cookie.
We know what we are getting: A little piece of wisdom, some lucky numbers, maybe even a Chinese word.
But as you might suspect, we really aren’t getting something authentically Chinese.
The origin of the fortune cookie is disputed, but most stories say it is an import — not from China, but from 19th century Japan. Jennifer Lee, the author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, writes that as early as 1870, confectionery shops in Kyoto carried a folded cracker with a fortune: Tsujiura senbei, or fortune cracker. It was larger and darker than today’s fortune cookies.
By the early 1900s, the fortune cookie had come to the U.S. along with Japanese immigrants. The Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park is usually cited as the origin of the first American fortune cookie. But at least three other immigrant businesses in Los Angeles also claim to have introduced it to the States.
But it was American food preferences that moved the fortune cookie to Chinese restaurants. Americans didn’t much like raw fish, a common feature in Japanese cuisine. So Japanese immigrants started Chinese restaurants and brought the fortune cookie with them.
Today, the largest fortune cookie maker in the world is Wonton Food, which makes more than four million cookies each day. An estimated three billion cookies are produced annually, according to history.com.
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Lorraine Kephart Dovell (1942 – 2026)
