Fortune cookie Period BOrigin theory CVerified

A fortune cookie is a thin baked wafer, folded in half while still hot so that a slip of paper bearing a fortune sits sealed inside. The dough is wheat flour, sugar and egg; each wafer is baked on an iron and folded around the slip while it is still soft.

Its ancestor is Japan's tsujiura senbei, a baked senbei with a fortune slip tucked inside. Tsujiura senbei are still baked today along shrine approaches such as Fushimi Inari in Kyoto.

In early-twentieth-century California, Japanese immigrants sweetened the senbei for American customers and spread it. Confectioneries and restaurants lined the districts where Japanese and Chinese immigrants lived, and these became the places where the cookie was made and handed to customers. In San Francisco, Makoto Hagiwara's Japanese Tea Garden is said to have served it between 1910 and 1914 and, in 1918, to have handed its production to a shop called Benkyo-do.

During the Second World War, the making of the cookie passed from Japanese to Chinese hands, and from then on it came to be seen as a Chinese sweet.

Many Americans take the cookie for something that grew out of Chinese food custom, a fixture of any Chinese meal. The researcher Yasuko Nakamachi, however, says it was Japanese immigrants in prewar California who began making it, first selling it through Japanese-run Chinese restaurants. The belief that it was born in China grew out of its being handed out after meals in America's Chinese restaurants.

The Japanese line runs further back. Sweets carrying fortune slips, not only senbei but also kelp, bean confections, fried karinto sticks and the wafer shells of monaka, already existed in the Tenpo era (1830–44), Nakamachi writes. An illustrated book registered for publication in Tokyo in December 1878, Moshiogusa Kinsei Kidan, shows a man baking senbei beneath a shop curtain lettered "tsujiura senbei," with a caption that calls him the senbei boy. By that year at the latest, tsujiura senbei were being baked in shops. That Japanese immigrants in California carried this senbei across and made it into a sweet cookie is now the established view.

Who first made the cookie in America is still an open question. Makoto Hagiwara of the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco, David Jung of the Hong Kong Noodle Company in Los Angeles (who dated his claim to 1918), and Seiichi Kito of Fugetsu-do in Los Angeles's Little Tokyo each claim to have devised it. A mock trial held in San Francisco in 1983 ruled in Hagiwara's favor, but Los Angeles never accepted the verdict. The broad frame of a Japanese origin is settled; the name of a single inventor still is not.