Course:HIST104/Fortune cookie

A fortune cookie is crunchy cookie traditionally served after North American Chinese cuisine. The ingredients of the cookie consists of flour, sugar, and vanilla,

which is then cooked in oil. Inside the cookie there is a written idiom that can also

pertain numbers that individuals would find lucky.

Origins in the New World

The origin of the fortune cookie is a hotly contested topic with a number of different cities and cultures claiming ownership of the cookie, while dismissing the claims of others. In an attempt to solve the mystery once and for all, a Court of Historical Review Mock Trial was held in 1983 in San Francisco to establish which of the three main accounts represented the true history of the fortune cookie. As a result, San Francisco was declared the fortune cookie`s place of origin, though others maintain their claim to the cookie while simultaneously rejecting the "ruling".

The one thing that all accounts agree upon is that the fortune cookie was developed somewhere in California. However, there is disagreement over whether it was Chinese or Japanese immigrants who pioneered the fortune cookie, in Los Angeles or San Francisco. The first claim to ownership comes from the Chinese, who trace the history of the fortune cookie back to the thirteenth century, when anti-Mongol revolutionaries were said to have passed secret messages to fellow rebels baked in cakes. Bringing the tradition with them, Chinese railroad workers in the 1870s are then said to have baked holiday greetings in biscuits, eventually developing into a cookie form. According to the residents of Los Angeles, around 1918 a Chinese immigrant, David Jung, is said to have put uplifting messages from a Presbyterian minister inside the pastries that he baked, handing them out to the poor in his neighborhood. By contrast, the San Francisco tradition argues that the fortune cookie was not invented by the Chinese at all, but in fact was created by Japanese immigrants, an adaptation of Japan's tsujiura sembei, a folded savory cookie which traditionally carried a message inside. The new, sweetened version in the US was created by Makoto Hagiwara, a Japanese man who served it to his customers at the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park for the first time in 1914 before presenting it at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915.

The debate over the fortune cookie's origins may lead one to wonder how exactly this item became associated with Chinese food, if it was, in fact, developed by the Japanese. According to Japanese-American claimants, one of the primary reasons for the strong association of the fortune cookie with Chinese food is the forced evacuation of people of Japanese ancestry from the North American West Coast during World War II. Japanese businesses, which made and sold fortune cookies, were closed, and anti-Japanese sentiment was strong. Chinese restaurants increased during this period, and they began to produce their own fortune cookies, quietly "acquiring" the fortune cookie as a Chinese food.

The Post-War Fortune Cookie

During the Word War II period, Chinese restaurants in San Francisco and Los Angeles seem to have begun adapting the Japanese Tea Cake to the form of the modern cookie. Fortune cookys, as they have been called, were hand-made, and included an English phrase that was inserted into the cookie.

The first patents for industrial automated fortune cookies date back to 1963-1974 by Edward Louie in San Francisco, showing a large enough demand in the local population to warrant automation. As the solders returned home, they brought with them the fortune cookie trend. Demand grew across America; with handmade supply being insufficient once again, manufacturers stepped in to meet demand. Patents filed in 1975 from New York and 1963 in Chicago show automatic cookie-folding and paper-inserting machines for fortune cookie production.

From America popularity grew significantly, expanding to Australia, England and Canada, with and increasing number of production facilities emerging in each of these countries to keep up with the rising demand. Australia, for example, opened its first mass manufacturing location in 1983. The popularity of the fortune cookie seems to have been mostly limited to English-speaking countries. Somewhat surprisingly, neither China nor Hong Kong have adopted this popular food trend; the Chinese language does not even have a direct translation for "fortune cookie". Europe has been more receptive to the fortune cookie, with England boasting many fortune cookie manufacturers, followed by Germany with relatively few.

The message in the center has always been a significant part of the fortune cookie's appeal. The Japanese cakes included a good omen or a wish; the Chinese fortune cookie included a similar good tip or a helpful anecdote and sometimes Confucian sayings. As even the first patents describing complex instructions for folding and inserting paper, it is clear that the fortune cookie would simply not be the same without the fortune. Modern fortune cookies obviously continue to include the fortune slip, while also sometimes adding lucky numbers (often used for the purposes of making lottery selections) and smiling face pictures.

Modern machine-made cookies range in price between 12 to 50 cents, and can be commonly ordered in a few different flavors, such as chocolate and vanilla. The basic type of cookie is used commonly as a complimentary after-dinner item in Chinese restaurants. Hand-made fortune cookies are less commonly encountered today, but a few manufacturing places, namely Golden Gate Fortune Cookies in San Francisco, continue to keep this tradition alive. Over the years, there has been remarkably little change when it comes to the cookies recipes, with the standard base consisting of egg, flour, sugar and flavorings. The cookie is then folded in half and pinched down to form the famous moon shape while still warm and malleable.

Recently, there has been an influx of custom-colored, flavored,and decorated cookies available to consumers. With many options-such as strawberry,lemon, or fortune cookies topped with sprinkles or encased in chocolate- these confections are often combined with customized fortune. Such "boutique" fortune cookies can range in size from the common 2 inch size to 2 feet long, and are often used as wedding or party giveaways.

Golden Yuan: A Canadian Case Study

For and interesting case of the fortune cookie within a contemporary Canadian setting, consider the example of Golden Yuan Asian Food Products. Golden Yuan is a brand owned by Top-Valu Food Products, a food distribution company established in Vancouver, Canada in 1963. This business was founded by Quan brothers, who had immigrated to Canada from a rural village near Guangzhou, China in the early 1950s. From these origins a half-century ago, the company continues to describe itself as a "family-run business," with its current operators being the third generation of fortune cookie- and noodle-makers from the Quan family line. Art Quan, speaking as a representative for the company, mentions that "our grandfather and uncles, all now deceased, were in the noodle and fortune cookie manufacturing business in the U.S.," creating an entrepreneurial tradition upon which Golden Yuan has built.

In addition to fortune cookies, Golden Yuan distributes various types of Asian noodles and wrappings for egg rolls and wontons to locations across western Canada. Aside from the supermarket chains Safeway, IGA, and T&T (the latter a chain of Asian-themed supermarkets), all of the grocery locations that sell Golden Yuan products appear to be Asian specialty shops; all of them are within the city of Vancouver and most are in or nearby Vancouver's Chinatown neighborhood. In this respect, Golden Yuan, through Top-Valu Products, appears to be focusing primarily on the Chinese-Canadian diaspora, an especially prominent cultural group in Greater Vancouver, where Golden Yuan's base of operations and, seemingly, most its customers are to be found.

The website for Golden Yuan, however, seems to suggest a somewhat different aim. On one page, for example, the website informs the reader on how to properly pronounce the world "yuan," and defines this word: "[A] Chinese coin. One of its most remarkable features is the square hole in the middle." This information would likely be common knowledge among Chinese-Canadians, especially those of relatively recent immigration status; instead, this explanatory feature seems to be geared toward other Canadian cultural groups (specifically English speakers), who may be browsing Golden Yuan's website as prospective customers. Similarly, the website also includes an interactive feature wherein the user can enter their year of birth in a box to reveal their Chinese Astrological Symbol. Both the nature of the Chinese Astrological Chart and the meaning of each symbol are explained briefly, again in a way that would presumably be more useful for those less familiar with the Chinese culture (and rather obvious to most Chinese-Canadians).

Though the fortune cookie would doubtfully be considered an exotically "Oriental" item by anyone in the contemporary Western world, Golden Yuan does seem to be marketing it and their other fairly common Asian Food products in such a manner. This strategy of implicit exoticism seems somewhat paradoxical, given that the majority of their customer base and the clients of those retailers would likely consider the fortune cookie to be among the most ubiquitously Westernized of (ostensibly) Asian foodstuffs.

Concluding Remarks

Throughout history the fortune cookie has been under constant scrutiny regarding its origin and how it became such a phenomena in the Western world. Being that it was invented by Asian immigrants in the United States it is safe to say that the cookie lacks Eastern antiquity .With the continuous popularity that the cookie holds, the creation of the fortune cookie could be a result from cultures in contact.