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Anyone who has ever eaten at a Chinese or Japanese restaurant is familiar with the fortune cookie. Because we encounter them almost exclusively at Asian restaurants, many assume that they are an ancient tradition from that continent. On the contrary, they are only about 100 years old and they were first created in America.

There is much debate as to the actual origin of these crispy little cookies. What is clear is that they were first made in California in the early 1900s. After that the details are up for debate.

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.

Others claim that a man named David Jung, an immigrant from China, deserves the credit for inventing the fortune cookie. David Jung was the founder of the Hong Kong Noodle Company and was well known for his philanthropy. Supposedly Jung invented the fortune cookie after encountering large numbers of homeless and hopeless people in the streets of Los Angeles. He wanted to find a way to give them hope. He had a minister write him brief phrases designed to inspire. Then he took those messages, baked them inside cookies and gave them to the poor in the streets.

It really doesn’t matter who actually invented the fortune cookie. What does matter is that everyone who had one wanted more. Demand for these crispy cookies with their hidden nuggets of wisdom grew very rapidly. Soon it was clear that folding each cookie individually with chopsticks was not an efficient enough process. In 1964, Edward Louie did the Lotus Fortune Cookie Company a great favor by creating a machine that did all the folding for them. Once perfected this machine was capable of mass producing fortune cookies. Now they were readily available and it didn’t take long before they were regularly served at most Asian restaurants.

Although the actual details as to the invention of the fortune cookie are a little hazy, there is no doubt that they were first made in America. Far from being an ancient Chinese tradition, these treats were not even available in mainland China until the 1990s. In an amusing little twist, fortune cookies in China were marketed with the slogan, “Genuine American Fortune Cookie”.