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Today in America fortune cookies are served at almost all Chinese and Japanese restaurants but rarely anywhere else. Because of this it is widely thought that they originated long ago in Asia. This is not the case however.

Fortune cookies were actually invented in the state California some time early in the last century. After that the facts as to their origin are not entirely clear.

One school of thought says that they were first made by a Japanese immigrant named Mokota Hagiwara in 1914. Apparently Hagiwara had suffered a run of bad luck. When he recovered he wanted to find a way to thank those who had helped him along the way. He wrote tiny thank you notes and folded them carefully into cookies. When he removed them from the oven, the fortune cookie had been born. He gave them to his friends who were very pleased with them. Soon he was serving them at the Japanese Tea Garden.

Chinese Americans disagree. They believe that a Chinese man, David Jung, invented the fortune cookie. He was the founder of the Hong Kong Noodle company in Los Angeles. Every day on his way to work he passed countless numbers of poor people. Looking for a way to inspire them he had a local minister write up short inspirational passages. He took these passages and baked them into carefully folded cookies. He then took these cookies and distributed them to the poor, hoping that they would give them some hope for their future.

What all can agree on is that once the concept of placing messages into a cookie was invented, it rapidly became very popular. Very soon large numbers of bakery employees were spending their days folding these cookies and placing fortunes inside of them. By 1964 these cookies had become so popular that it was next to impossible for the demand to be met. An employee of the Lotus Fortune Cookie Company named Edward Louie invented a machine that folded and stuffed the cookies. Once these cookies could be mass produced they became even more common and soon were a mainstay of every Asian restaurant.

Regardless of the actual origin of the fortune cookie, it is clear that they are, in fact, an American, not Asian, tradition. They were not even introduced to the people of China until the 1990s. In a funny twist, today they are marketed in China with the motto, “Genuine American Fortune Cookies”.