Whence the fortune cookie?

The deeper you dig, the less expected the results:

Some 3 billion fortune cookies are made each year, almost all in the United States. But the crisp cookies wrapped around enigmatic sayings have spread around the world. They are served in Chinese restaurants in Britain, Mexico, Italy, France and elsewhere. . .

But there is one place where fortune cookies are conspicuously absent: China.

So far, so old news. But it now seems incontrovertible that the origins of the American fortune cookie are Japanese.

Her prime pieces of evidence are the generations-old small family bakeries making obscure fortune cookie-shaped crackers by hand near a temple outside Kyoto. She has also turned up many references to the cookies in Japanese literature and history, including an 1878 image of a man making them in a bakery - decades before the first reports of American fortune cookies. . .

The families of Japanese or Chinese immigrants in California that claim to have invented or popularized fortune cookies all date the cookie's appearance between 1907 and 1914.

From the NY Times.

Posted by David on January 16, 2008 11:50 AM