Jonathan Cheung's List: Fortune Cookie Myth

• Navigate the tiny streets of Chinatown to find the hole-in-the-wall factory that is Golden Gate Fortune Cookies (use your nose more than Google Maps for this one as getting there is half the fun). A tiny factory where a couple of ladies use ancient machinery to make fortune cookies by hand. It’s just great to watch and tastes good too.

• a narrow alley between Jackson and Washington Streets in San Francisco's Chinatown, the sweet vanilla scent of baking wafers will lead you right to the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Company, which has been in business since 1962, and which still make fortune cookies the old-fashioned way, by hand.

• Now a researcher in Japan believes she can explain the disconnect, which has long perplexed American tourists in China. Fortune cookies, Yasuko Nakamachi says, are almost certainly originally from Japan.

• The history of fortune cookies is a little murky. Some think that modern-day fortune cookies were inspired by 14th century Chinese rebels against Mongol invaders.
• Others believe that the fortune cookies have Japanese roots in traditional tsujiura senbei (rice cakes with paper fortunes stuffed inside), made at the Hyotanyama Inari shrine in the 19th century.
• Most people nowadays believe that fortune cookies were created by a Japanese man named Makoto Hagiwara in 1914 in San Francisco.
• Hagiwara owned what is now called the Golden Gate Park Japanese Tea Garden, where he served tea and fortune cookies. However, many still hold to the popular belief that fortune cookies were invented by a Chinese-American named David (Tsung) Jung, who owned the Hong Kong Noodle Company in Los Angeles.

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• The flavoring of this original form was more savory, complementing the taste of green tea nicely.  It was not then a sweet confection/cookie.  Its Japanese name is tsuji ura sembei.  It is a form of the great varieties of rice crackers so popular in Japan.  This one was then a savory cookie back then.