Reading Room · Fortune-Telling Methods · Method
Where do fortune cookies come from?
Fortune cookies are a method of baking a folded wafer around a paper message. Most historians trace the modern American form to Japanese tsujiura senbei, made around Kyoto, and to Japanese bakeries in early 1900s San Francisco and Los Angeles, not to China.
Facts checked on against 12 sources, 6 of them museum, university, archive, library, government or primary texts.
Key facts
Every line comes from a source listed at the bottom of the page. The small numbers point to it.
| Edo period | Japanese bakers in the Kyoto area make a folded cracker with a message, which Selena Takigawa Hoy of Atlas Obscura describes as the forerunner of the fortune cookie.12 |
|---|---|
| 1878 | A Japanese woodblock print and storybooks from this year show a man making tsujiura senbei in a bakery with hand grills.134 |
| 1908 | Makoto Hagiwara is believed to have first served the cookies at the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco.51 |
| 1913 | The Hong Kong Noodle Company in Los Angeles begins making fortune cookies in tin cans.6 |
| 1918 | Benkyo-do takes over cookie making from the Hagiwaras, and its founder Suyeichi Okamura adds vanilla flavor.1 |
| 1940s | Japanese American bakeries close during World War II, and Chinese bakeries take over production.147 |
| 1983 | A mock Court of Historical Review in San Francisco rules on the cookie's origin, with a split decision.23 |
| 2022–2023 | OpenFortune begins using ChatGPT to draft fortune phrases, while keeping its human copywriters.8 |
Method and ingredients
Fortune cookies are simply made with flour, sugar, vanilla, and butter or oil, lightly baked or griddled and then folded into shape.59
The basic fortune cookie ingredients are flour, sugar, water, and eggs, and commercial manufacturers may also add baking soda, baking powder, turmeric extract, peanut oil, stabilizing agents, and anticaking agents such as silico aluminate.10
In the manufacturing process, batter is pumped into a circular fortune cookie oven with shallow flat-bottomed cups, and flat metal plates flatten the dough and bake both sides, with one complete orbit taking 3.5 minutes.10
In the manufacturing process, machines fold the hot cookie around a paper fortune and bend it into its crescent shape, after which it is cooled by fan air and packaged.10
Nina Killham described the 1986 production process: a tablespoon of golden liquid dough is dropped onto a mold, covered by a top mold, baked by gas flames for about 1 minute, and a message tag is placed in the middle of the fresh-baked disk before the cookie is folded.11
Japanese origins and the Kyoto cracker
Fortune cookies most closely resemble a cookie called tsujiura senbei that originated in Kyoto, Japan, in the 1800s. Tsujiura senbei were wafer-like, more savory than modern fortune cookies, and held a paper fortune in the bend of the wafer.534
Japanese tsujiura senbei were flavored with sesame and miso and were larger and browner than American fortune cookies, with paper fortunes found on the outside.3
Yasuko Nakamachi found family-owned bakeries near a Shinto shrine in Kyoto that continued the local tradition of making tsujiura senbei.34
Tamenaga Shunsui's work The Young Grass of Spring describes brittle cookies containing fortunes, and is among the earliest references to Japanese fortune cookies.1
Immigrant bakers in California
Benkyodo was the Japanese Tea Garden's sole supplier of fortune cookies until the outbreak of World War II.7
Japanese immigrants could not open Japanese restaurants around the turn of the 20th century, according to Lee, because Americans did not want to eat raw fish, so many opened Chinese restaurants instead.4
What the tradition holds
How practitioners describe it, in their terms. Described, not endorsed.
Fortune cookies came from more than one inventor, and Japanese and Chinese immigrant bakers each claim the invention. Kito of Fugetsu-do in Los Angeles claims he invented the cookie and took the idea of a message from omikuji sold at Japanese temples and shrines.2
Merlin Lowe's Hong Kong brand history credits David Jung with inventing the fortune cookie in 1918 in Los Angeles, and states Jung handed out cookies with Bible passages to the homeless.6
Grace Chu, in Madame Chu's Cooking School, credits George Jung with starting the Hong Kong Noodle Company in 1916.10
What the evidence shows
What historians, scientists and controlled tests have found.
Jennifer 8. Lee's The Fortune Cookie Chronicles traced the cookie's origins to Japanese immigrants in California, and she cites three Los Angeles-based immigrant-run businesses that also claimed to have invented it around the same time.4
Kevin Chan, co-owner of San Francisco's Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory, said the factory's oldest machine dates to the 1950s.12
Worked out from the evidence
Not stated outright by any one source. It is worked out from the sources cited.
- The weight of the evidence places the modern American fortune cookie in early 1900s California, descended from Japanese tsujiura senbei rather than from a Chinese form.12243
- The accounts disagree over which inventor came first, and the 1983 court ruling did not decide the nationality of the cookie's makers.310
Not yet confirmed
- Which early bakers first put a fortune inside a folded cookie in California, and how long before 1908 did the practice start?
- How much of the Kyoto tsujiura senbei tradition carried over into the American form, and which features were added in the United States?
Sources
Museums, universities, archives and primary texts first. Every fact is paraphrased and nothing is copied; Wikipedia is never cited.
- atlasobscura.com: The Free Cookie in Your Chinese Takeout Is Actually Japanese. Read on · Reference
- accesschinese.com: Crack a Fortune Cookie. Get your free fortune cookie online. Read on · Reference
- smithsonianmag.com: Cracking Open the History of Fortune Cookies. Read on · Museum
- history.com: The Surprising Origins of the Fortune Cookie | HISTORY. Read on · Reference
- ice.edu: Fortune Cookie | Institute of Culinary Education. Read on · University
- americanhistory.si.edu: The mysterious can of fortune | National Museum of American History. Read on · Museum
- americanhistory.si.edu: Origins of a fortune cookie | National Museum of American History. Read on · Museum
- smithsonianmag.com: A.I. Is Coming to Your Fortune Cookies. Read on · Museum
- flybyjing.com: History of Fortune Cookie – FLY BY JING. Read on · Reference
- encyclopedia.com: Fortune Cookie | Encyclopedia.com. Read on · Reference
- The Washington Post: Fortune Cookies: The Medium & Messages - The Washington Post. Read on · Library
- atlasobscura.com: A Day in the Life of a Fortune Cookie Maker at the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory - Gastro Obscura. Read on · Reference