IN FRATERNAM MEAM: FORTUNE HUNTER

IN FRATERNAM MEAM

Saturday, February 16, 2008

FORTUNE HUNTER

Researcher attempts to solve a riddle wrapped in the mystery of a simple cookie.

Some 3 billion fortune cookies are made each year, almost all in the United States. But the crisp cookies wrapped around enigmatic sayings have spread around the world. They are served in Mexico, Italy, France and elsewhere.

But there is one place where fortune cookies are conspicously absent: CHINA.

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

Her prime pieces of evidence are the centuries old small family bakeries making obscure fortune cookie shaped crackers by hand near a temple outside Kyoto. She also has turned up many references to the cookies in Japanese literature and history, including an 1878 etching of a man making them in a bakery -- decades before the first reports of American fortune cookies.

The idea that fortune cookies come from Japan is counterintuitive, to say the least, "I am surprised," said Derrick Wong, vice president of the largest fortune cookie manufacturer in the world, Wonton Food, based in Brooklyn. "People see it and think of it as a Chinese food dessert, not a Japanese food desserts."

Nakamachi, a folklore and history graduate student at Kanagawa University outside Tokyo, has spent six years trying to establish the Japanese origin of the fortune cookie, much of that at the National Diet Library (the Japanese equivalent of the Library of Congress). She has sifted through thousands of old documents and drawings. She has also traveled to temples and shrines across the country, conducting interviews to piece together the history of the fortune telling within Japanese desserts.

Nakamachi saw her first fortune cookie in the 1980s in a New York City Chinese restaurant. It was only in the late 1990s, outside Kyoto near one of the most popular Shinto shrines in Japan, that she saw the familiar shape at a family bakery called Sohonke Hogyokudo.

"These were exactly like fortune cookies," she said.

The cookies were made by hand by a young man who held back grills over a flame. The grills contained round mold into which batter is poured, something like a small waffle iron. Little pieces of paper were tucked inside the cookies fold while they were still warm. With that sighting, Nakamichi's long research misson began.

The Japanese fortune cookies Nakamichi found there and at a handful of nearby bakers differ in some ways from the ones that American receive at the end of a meal. They are bigger and browner, as their batter contains sesame and miso rather than vanilla and butter.

Storybook discovery

As she researched the cookie's Japanese origins, among the most persuasive pieces of evidence Nakamachi found was illustration from a 19th century book of stories, "Moshiogusa Kinsei Kidan". A character in one of the tales is an apprentice in a senbei store. In Japan, the cookies are called variously, tsujiura senbei ("fortune crackers"), omikuji senbei ("written fortune crackers"), and suzu senbei ("bell crackers")

The apprentice appears to be grilling wafers in black irons over coals, the same way they are made in Hogyokudo and other present day bakeries.

The book, story and illustration are all dated 1878. The families of Japanese or Chinese immigrants in California tht claim to have invented or popularized fortune cookies all date the cookie's appearance between 1907 and 1914. The illustration was the kind of needle in a haystack discovery that academics yearn for.

she found other historical traces of the cookies as well. In a work of fiction by Tamenaga Shunsui, who lived between 1790 and 1843, a woman tries to placate two other women with tsujiura senbei that contains fortunes.

Nakamachi's work, originally published in 2004 as part of a Kanagawa University report, has been picked up by some food related publications in Japan. But otherwise, the paper has drawn limited attention, perhaps because fortune cookies are not well known in Japan.

Wartime novelty

If fortune cookies are Japanese in origin, how did they become a mainstay of American Chinese restaurants? Nakamachi visited San Francisco and Los Angeles, where she interviewed the descendants of Japanese and Chinese immigrant families who made fortune cookies.

The cookie's path is ralatively easy to trace back to World War II. At that time they were a regional specialty, served in California Chinese restaurant, where they were known as "fortune tea cakes". There, according to later interviews with fortune cookie makers, they were encounted by military personnel passing through San Francisco on the way back from the Pacific Theater. When the veterans returned home, they would ask their local Chinese restaurants why they did'nt serve fortune cookies as the San Francisco restaurants did.

The cookies rapidly spread across the country. By the late 1950s, an estimated 250 million fortune cookies were being produced each year by dozens of small Chinese bakeries and fortune cookie companies.

But before World War II, the history is murky. A number of immigrant families in California, mostly Japanese, have laid claim to introducing or popularizing the cookie.

Nakamachi is still unsure how exactly fortune cookies made the jump to Chinese restaurants. But during the 1920s and 1930s, many Japanese immigrants in California owned chp suey restaurants, which served Americanized chinese cuisine. The Umeya bakery distributed fortune cookies to more than 100 restaurants in southern and central California.

Chinese owned restaurants discovered the cookies too, Nakamachi speculates that Chinese owned manufacturers began to take over fortune cookie production during World War II, when Japanses bakeries on the West Coast closed as Japanese-American were rounded up and sent to internment camps.

"The Japanes may have invented the fortune cookies", Wong said. "But the Chinese people really explored the potential of the fortune cookie. It's Chinese-American culture. It only happens here, not in China."

(Source: CHICAGOTRIB/Good Eating by Jennifer Lee/New York Times News Service)
(ctc-goodeating@tribune.com)

posted by infraternam meam @ 2:30 PM

2 Comments:

At 9:21 PM, Sidney said…

I learn something new today. Interesting...
What is the message in your fortune cookie?
At 12:15 AM, infraternam meam said…

isidney,
if you come and check my reply to your comments, i cannot get into your blog to give my comments. at any rate, thanks for visiting.