Fortune Cookie Day

What the day is

Fortune Cookie Day is observed on September 13, though a similar day is also marked in July on some calendars. It celebrates the crisp, folded cookie with a slip of paper inside, served at the end of a meal in Chinese American restaurants. The origin of the day is not documented.

The cookie is a good example of a food that people assume is traditional but is in fact a product of American immigrant life. It is not eaten in China, and many visitors there are surprised to learn that it exists.

Origin and background

The fortune cookie appears to come from California in the early twentieth century, and its invention is disputed. One claim goes to Makoto Hagiwara, who managed the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco and is said to have served the cookies there around 1914. Another goes to David Jung, a Chinese immigrant who founded the Hong Kong Noodle Company in Los Angeles and is said to have handed them out in the late 1910s. Each had supporters, and in 1983 a mock trial in San Francisco, the Court of Historical Review and Appraisal, ruled in favor of Hagiwara, though this was more of an amusing event than a legal decision.

Researchers point to an older Japanese precedent. Bakeries near Kyoto had long made a similar folded cracker, called tsujiura senbei, with a slip of paper tucked inside, and Japanese immigrants may have brought the idea to California. Chinese American restaurants adopted the cookie widely after the Second World War, and it became an expected part of the meal.

The messages have changed over time. Early ones were often proverbs, and later ones included lucky numbers and, in a feature that took off in the 1990s, Chinese words with English translations.

How to take part

• Visit a Chinese restaurant and read your fortune aloud at the table.
• Bake fortune cookies at home, which requires working quickly while the cookies are hot to fold them.
• Write your own fortunes and tuck them into cookies for friends, with a kind or funny message.
• Read each fortune aloud and decide whether it applies to you, which is half the fun.
• Look at the history of how foods change when they move across cultures, using the fortune cookie as an example.