Who made the first fortune cookie

It's something you can always depend on after a heaping plate of beef and noodles or kung pao chicken. A 107-ish calorie cookie that enlightens, illuminates and occasionally teaches those who crack it open a few words of Mandarin.

But the first thing you should know about fortune cookies is they do not come from China. In fact, it wasn't even a Chinese person who first created the beloved confection. What makes this 100-year-old cookie even more exciting than the fortune found inside is the history — and mystery — within. Here's everything you've ever wanted to know about the fortune cookie.

The History of the Fortune Cookie

It's likely that we'll never truly know who invented the fortune cookie, but all signs point to a Japanese immigrant named Seiichi Kito. The story goes like this: In 1903, Kito opened the now-historic confectionary shop in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo called Fugetsu-Do. Inspired by the savory Japanese confections called tsujiura senbe found in temples and shrines in Kyoto, Kito started hiding little "fortune slips" (omikuji) within his cookies.

But others claim it was a Chinese immigrant and founder of Los Angeles' Hong Kong Noodle Company, David Jung, who came up with the idea for fortune cookies when he began handing out "baked cookies filled with inspiring passages of scripture" to the unemployed. In case you're wondering, Kito called out Jung for allegedly stealing his idea and maintains that it was he who originally invented the cookie.

Regardless of who first developed the idea, it was certainly the Chinese who managed to secure the public's association with these little cookies and their home country. Some say the culture shift happened during World War II, while the Japanese were unjustly rounded up and send to internment camps. It's speculated that Chinese restaurant owners took advantage of the gap in the marketplace by producing their own fortune cookies, effectively erasing Japan's influence on the cookie.

By the mid-20th century, it is estimated that more than 250 million fortune cookies were produced every year by both fortune cookie companies (Wonton Food Inc. produces an estimated 4.5 million fortune cookies per day) and independent Chinese bakeries. At Wonton Food Inc., each fortune has to be approved before it goes into the cookie.

How Do You Make Fortune Cookies?

So, what goes into fortune cookies aside from the actual fortune? Chef, YouTuber, cookbook author and TV host, and Pailin Chongchitnant lists this super-simple recipe on her site Hot Thai Kitchen.

Ingredients

• 1 egg white, room temp
• 3 ½ Tbsp. caster sugar or superfine sugar
• Pinch of salt
• ¼ tsp vanilla or other flavoring of your choice (almond extract and lemon zest are some good ideas)
• ¼ cup all-purpose flour
• 2 Tbsp. melted butter

Directions

• Whisk egg white until frothy.
• Add sugar and whisk together until the mixture is smooth and glossy.
• Add vanilla and salt; whisk to combine.
• Add flour and whisk just until smooth. Whisk in melted butter.
• Spoon drops of the batter into the shape of a circle onto a flat baking sheet.
• Bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit (176 degrees Celsius) for 8 to 10 minutes or until the edges of the cookies begin to brown.

Once you pull them out of the oven is when the magic happens.

"What you want is for the browning to happen around the edges and a little bit into the center," says Pailin in an email. By baking the fortune cookies in the oven just long enough to cook the dough, the cookie can be folded with a fortune inside without it breaking.

"Let [your cookie] cool in a muffin tin so it holds its shape," continues Pailin, "and they'll crisp as they cool." Pailin says it's totally fine to put your cookies back into the oven at 275 degrees Fahrenheit (135 degrees Celsius) for eight to 10 minutes if they're too soft.

"I love fortune cookies," adds Pailin. "I love how even adults get a bit of a childlike excitement when opening them to see what's inside. Also, most of the time Chinese restaurants don't have much in ways of dessert options, so for people who feel like a meal isn't complete without something sweet (like me) it's a nice treat."

Now, there are fortune cookie machines like the Kitamura FCM-8006W that suck fortunes into place and use "metal fingers to fold the fortune in half to trap the fortune inside" and can produce up to 8,000 cookies in an hour.

Almost every Chinese restaurant ends a meal with a few fortune cookies, those crunchy, folded treats with a special message inside. But you may be surprised to know that the fortune cookie is not Chinese at all. In fact, modern-day fortune cookies first appeared in California in the early 1900s. There is some discrepancy, however, on who actually invented the cookie.

Most sources credit either Makoto Hagiwara or David Jung with the invention of the fortune cookie. Of the two, Hagiwara seems to have the stronger claim. A Japanese immigrant who had served as official caretaker of the Japanese Tea Gardens in San Francisco since 1895, Hagiwara began serving the cookies at the Tea Garden sometime between 1907 and 1914. (His grandson, George Hagiwara, believes the correct date is between 1907 and 1909). The cookies were based on Japanese senbei—toasted rice wafers. According to some sources, the cookies contained thank-you notes instead of fortunes and may have been Hagiwara’s way of thanking the public for getting him rehired after he was fired by a racist Mayor.

Meanwhile, Canton, China, native David Jung had immigrated to Los Angeles and in 1916 he founded the Hong Kong Noodle Company. He claimed to have invented the fortune cookie around 1918, handing out baked cookies filled with inspiring passages of scripture to unemployed men. However, there is no surviving documentation showing how he came up with the idea.

In 1983, the San Francisco Court of Historical Review held a mock trial to settle the issue for once and for all. (The Court has no legal authority; other weighty culinary issues they have settled include whether or not chicken soup deserves its reputation as "Jewish Penicillin.") During the trial, someone provided the judge with a fortune cookie containing the message "S.F. Judge who rules for L.A. not very smart cookie." In fairness to Daniel M. Hanlon, the real-life federal judge who presided over the case, his decision rested on weightier pieces of evidence, including a set of grills. Still, it came as no surprise when the Court sided with Hagiwara and ruled that San Francisco is the birthplace of the fortune cookie.

Not surprisingly, Angelenos ignored the ruling: many sources continue to credit Jung with inventing fortune cookies. But for now, Los Angeles (County) will have to be satisfied with being the official birthplace of the Cobb Salad and the Shirley Temple mocktail.

Or maybe not. Yet another possibility is that the fortune cookie was invented by a Japanese American living in Los Angeles. That is the claim of the proprietors of Fugetsu-Do, a family-owned and operated bakery in the Little Tokyo district of downtown Los Angeles. According to the Kito family, the idea for the fortune cookie originated with their grandfather, Seiichi Kito, who founded Fugetsu-do in 1903. While the confectionary quickly became famous for its mochi—sweet round rice cakes accompanied by everything from sweet red bean paste to peanut butter—at some point Kito began making fortune cookies and selling them to Chinese restaurants. Visitors to the shop can still see the original fortune cookie molds on display in the front store window “collecting dust and memories.”

According to sources, Kito's inspiration was omi-kuji – fortunes written on slips of paper found in Japanese Buddhist temples. Today, you’ll find omikuji-senbei (“fortune crackers”) sold in bakeries in Japan.

But where does the inspiration for modern-day fortune cookie messages come from? Despite the fact that fortune cookies have proved about as popular in China as a plate of cooked spinach is to the average five-year-old, their origins may be Chinese after all. Every fall (the 15th day of the eighth month in the Chinese calendar, to be exact) the Chinese celebrate the mid-Autumn Moon Festival. Children hear the legend of how, in the 14th century, the Chinese threw off their Mongol oppressors by hiding messages in Mooncakes (which the Mongols did not like to eat). On the night of the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival, the rebels attacked and overthrew the government, leading to the establishment of the Ming dynasty.

Today's Mooncakes don’t contain messages, but some believe that during the American railway boom of the 1850s, Chinese railway workers came up with their own substitute for the mooncakes they were unable to buy: homemade biscuits with good luck messages inside.

Like the mooncake legend, no proof for this story exists. And, thanks to the exhaustive efforts of Japanese researcher Yasuko Nakamachi, we now know that at about the same time the Chinese railway workers were laying down tracks, tsujiura senbei (rice cakes containing paper fortunes) were being made at the Hyotanyama Inari shrine outside Kyoto in Japan. According to Jennifer 8. Lee's book, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, Nakamachi uncovered an illustration in an 1878 book showing a man grilling tsujiura senbei outside the shrine.

So, where do fortune cookies come from? At this point, the weight of historical evidence seems to agree with a man interviewed for the movie, “The Killing of a Chinese Cookie”, who states, “The Japanese invented the fortune cookie, the Chinese advertised it, and the Americans tasted it.” Still, as author Lee says, it’s “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside a cookie.”