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 some question as to the exact history of the fortune cookie. The only thing we are certain of is that they appeared first in California sometime around 1900. Beyond that little is known for certain.

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.

Chinese Americans disagree. They believe that a Chinese man, David Jung, invented the fortune cookie. He was the founder of the Hong Kong Noodle company in Los Angeles. Every day on his way to work he passed countless numbers of poor people. Looking for a way to inspire them he had a local minister write up short inspirational passages. He took these passages and baked them into carefully folded cookies. He then took these cookies and distributed them to the poor, hoping that they would give them some hope for their future.

Regardless of the true origin of those crispy little cookies, what is clear is that people loved them. The demand for them grew quickly. Unfortunately folding those little cookies into their distinctive shapes was a very time consuming process done with chopsticks. In 1964, Edward Louie of the Lotus Fortune Cookie Company, invented a machine that did the folding for him. Now large numbers of the cookies could be made in a short period of time. It was not long before fortune cookies could be found in almost every Asian restaurant.

No one will ever know which of these stories is the truth, but it does seem pretty safe to assume that they were invented in America, not Asia. In fact, the people of China had never even seen fortune cookies until the 1990s. To prove the point, when they were introduced to China they were advertised as the “Genuine American Fortune Cookie

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