In Chinese-American restaurants, fortune cookies are often offered as an after-dinner dessert, either in a bag with the check or as an add-on item for customers to purchase on their way out, along with a variety of other complimentary items. It’s possible that they’ll talk about the brief words written on the paper tucked inside of the folded cookie, which these days tend to seem more like an idiom than a true fortune: Don’t allow your limitations to get in the way of your potential.
These assumptions are correct, yet the fortune cookie’s history is more nuanced than you may expect. She is the journalist and producer behind the documentary The Search for General Tso and the author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, an inquiry into Chinese food in the United States. When Lee explains how the fortune cookie’s roots may be traced back to Japanese-owned Chinese restaurants in Los Angeles and San Francisco, he explains that the iron grills on which the cookies were baked made them possible. It’s not uncommon to come across references to cookies wrapped in paper in art and literature dating back to the 1870s in specific parts of Japan.
Due to a humiliating period in American history, fortune cookies became associated with the Chinese, namely the incarceration of Japanese-Americans and Japanese immigrants during World War II. A large number of Chinese individuals took over Chinese restaurants and the equipment needed to produce fortune cookies when Japanese families were sent to internment camps.
Manufacturing plants creating 6,000 Fortune Cookies an hour
It’s gotten more and more industrialised in the last several decades to make fortune cookies, with some factories producing up to 6,000 biscuits an hour using industrial machinery. In certain industries, such as Golden Gate in San Francisco, “special Rube Goldberg-type equipment [that] cranks out like small yellow circles and then you have a person at the other end that needs to fold them” is still in use. As a consequence, Golden Gate produces roughly ten thousand cookies a day as a consequence of the slower procedure.
Find out what fortune cookie writers go through when they run into writer’s block in this week’s Gastropod episode, which features a mock trial between the cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco as well as massive lottery winnings.
