I Reopened the Fortune Cookie Case

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]The fortune cookie mystery was supposedly solved almost 20 years ago.

[00:00:06]For decades, multiple families in California claimed they invented the fortune cookie. But in 2008, The New York Times published a story declaring the debate over.

[00:00:18]A Japanese researcher had spent 6 years in archives and found an 1878 illustration, a drawing of someone making fortune crackers. Mainstream media repeated the story fortune cookies were Japanese. Case closed.

[00:00:35]This is how the Japanese claim started.

[00:00:37]Researcher Yasuko Nakamachi saw generations old small family bakeries making fortune cookie shaped crackers by hand near a temple outside Kyoto. They looked exactly like the fortune cookies she'd eaten [music] at Chinese restaurants in America.

[00:00:56]But is the case really closed? Because when you take the fortune cookie apart and trace each piece separately, from the rice cracker tradition, the fortune tradition, the shape, the taste, all the way to the packaging, the story gets more interesting than {quote} "it's Japanese."

[00:01:16]And more honest. Hi, my name is Christie and this is the American Chinese Food Show.

[00:01:22]This is what the New York Times article had to say with Nakamachi's finding on the old fortune cracker illustration.

[00:01:30]The book, story, and illustration are all dated 1878.

[00:01:35]The families of Japanese or Chinese immigrants in California that claimed to have invented or popularized fortune cookies all date the cookies' appearance between 1907 and 1914.

[00:01:50]The implication, if the illustration predates the California claims, it could not have been invented in California.

[00:01:59]Before we take a look at the illustration, let's talk about rice crackers, senbei. A Japanese rice crackers often eaten with green tea as a casual snack and offered to guests. I eat these all the time late at night when I write my episodes for this channel with my room temperature Japanese beer. They come in various shapes, sizes, and flavors, usually savory, sometimes sweet.

[00:02:27]Now, the illustration is from a book called Mishio Gusa Strange Tales from Recent Times. The illustration shows a worker grilling senbei in long-handled irons almost identical to the tools we see in Kyoto today. A sign above the worker reads Shujiro Senbei, meaning fortune crackers.

[00:02:51]Well, they do look like fortune cookies.

[00:02:55]But, if you keep zooming in, they're actually just round. A flat iron press like this one for making senbei you can find today at the Fukuoka Museum.

[00:03:10]And the Smithsonian Museum. The 1878 illustration only proves that people were making fortune crackers with that long-handled iron. Still a very solid finding.

[00:03:21]But, here's one I found in 1901, 9 years before the earliest California claim. The San Francisco Chronicle ran a full-page feature on Wakashiro, a baker on Pine Street.

[00:03:37]The headline, "The Only Japanese Bakery [music] in America."

[00:03:42]The photographs show the exact same equipment.

[00:03:47]Each tong contains dough for one crisp wafery senbei, which takes at least 5 minutes to bake. As each cake is baked, the operator unclamped the tongs, removes the soft cake, which stiffens when cold, until it is brittle as a chip.

[00:04:06]The style turned out depends much on the way in which they are handled after leaving [music] the molds. Some are rolled over a bamboo reed and shape themselves like a piece of paper, which has been revolved around a pencil.

[00:04:20][music] Japanese Americans were already making senbei in San Francisco with that same iron press, but we were still not quite there yet when it comes to the fortune cookies that we know today.

[00:04:34]Let's talk about fortune tradition.

[00:04:36]Today in Japan, fortune crackers come in all shapes, flowers, ninja star, triangle envelopes. The Kabuki News magazine in 1897 reported that Shujiro was the popular fad of the moment.

[00:04:51][music] You can find fortunes in senbei, in beans, even >> [music] >> toothpicks.

[00:04:58]I found a woodblock print from 1856, 22 years before the illustration everyone keeps citing.

[00:05:06]It's by Utagawa Kunisada II, and the title translates as enjoying opening a fortune in the morning.

[00:05:15]The woman on the left is holding a box of fortune crackers. The woman on the right is holding one cracker in her hand.

[00:05:22]>> [music] >> They are folded and square. Inside is an actress' portrait. These are theater fortune crackers, >> [music] >> part of the Edo entertainment world. The box has a clam on it, the mark of confectionery called "Tsugetsudo".

[00:05:36]I found this through the first issue of the Ukiyo-e magazine from 1915, which includes a whole chapter on Tsugetsudo's fortune crackers. These actor portrait fortune crackers were already famous enough in 1850s to be listed in the guide of the Yoshiwara pleasure district as one of Edo's celebrated specialties.

[00:06:00]So, in 1856 in Japan, people were eating folded fortune cookies with paper fortunes inside. Notice what this tradition is, theatrical, Edo pleasure district. It is not a Kyoto temple tradition.

[00:06:17]So, okay. Now, the shape. Inariya, Tokyo Kudo, and Masuya. These are the family bakeries near the in Kyoto that researchers Nakamachi came across. They make senbei with wheat flour, sugar, white miso, and white sesame seeds. Some folded in half like an 1856 illustration. Some curved in the middle. Similar to what the 1901 San Francisco Chronicle article described.

[00:06:50]The most popular item is actually Inari senbei shaped like a fox.

[00:06:56]Because the Shinto deity Inari's messenger is the fox kitsune.

[00:07:02]The crescent shaped fortune cookie is only one item among several.

[00:07:08]Turns out with Japanese rice crackers, each shape has its own story. A local culture magazine Kyoto Shumi from 1925 traced how the half moon senbei came about in the 1860s. A few young men were regulars at a senbei baker named Seibei in Sasayama, a small countryside town an hour away from Kobe. One of them, Hirano Kyozo, the son of a wealthy local family, asked Seibei to fold a senbei in half before baking it. He liked it. He named it the half-moon senbei, Han Getsu Senbei. At its peak, five or six shops in the area alone sold them.

[00:07:53]So, this is what we know.

[00:07:55]Different regions in Japan had different fortune traditions, different shapes, different fillings, different social contexts.

[00:08:05]And once these ideas reached California, they changed again.

[00:08:11]So, I have a theory.

[00:08:16]The Kyoto shops Nakamachi documented were treated as the missing origin point of the American fortune cookie. Old family bakeries, ancient traditions prove that the cookie existed long before California.

[00:08:31]Those three shops, Masuya was founded in 1930. [music] A 2017 TV Tokyo feature noted that Inariya and Hogyokudo both started all operating [music] in the early Showa period. That means after 1926.

[00:08:52]By the time these Kyoto shops opened, you could already buy {quote} {unquote} Chinese fortune cookies in cans, in supermarkets, [music] all across the country of the United States, not just in California.

[00:09:09]So, maybe the story wasn't one way.

[00:09:14]The tradition of fortune senbei is the specific fortune cookie that became the symbol of Chinese food in America today, >> [music] >> the crescent shape, the vanilla flavor, the funny English fortune inside, may still have been shaped just as much by California as Japan.

[00:09:37]Somewhere along the way, it stopped belonging entirely to one culture.

[00:09:43]That's it for today's episode. Follow along with the rest of this fortune cookie series.

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