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The Mystery of the Fortune Cookie

To many people, particularly in America, every good Chinese meal should end with a fortune cookie. So, would you believe that one place you won’t see a fortune cookie is China?

These cookies have a long and mysterious history − one that doesn’t begin in China. According to researcher Yasuko Nakamachi, fortune cookies actually originated in Japan!

Ms. Nakamachi first saw Japanese fortune cookies at a bakery while visiting a popular temple outside Kyoto in the 1990s. However, the baker was folding a paper fortune into a fold on the outside of the cookie, not the inside, like the fortune cookies we are used to.

Ms. Nakamachi was very curious about this, and decided to do her own research. After spending six years going through thousands of old documents and drawings, and interviewing bakers around the country, she realized that fortune cookies used to be very popular in Japan.

The reason that Takashi Matsuhisa, the Baker, puts the fortune on the outside of the cookie is to make sure that people don’t accidentally eat the paper!

Ms. Nakamachi found a drawing that went as far back as 1878, showing a Japanese man making the same kind of cookies as Matsuhisa’s bakery. This is very interesting because a number of people claimed to have invented fortune cookies in California in the 1920s.

If these cookies are a Japanese invention, then why are they served in American Chinese restaurants? After interviewing many Japanese and Chinese American families, Ms. Nakamachi suggested that it’s likely that Japanese people first started serving fortune cookies in their restaurants when they moved to the United States.

Then Chinese restaurant owners borrowed the idea and began making their own fortune cookies, beginning the now-traditional practice of serving fortune cookies at the end of each meal.

Today, about three billion of these cookies are made annually in the U.S. and are served in restaurants all over the world.

Although fortune cookies might not be a traditional snack in China, they have become one for people in many other countries.