20 July: Fortune Cookie Day

On Fortune Cookie Day, here are 10 things you might not know about fortune cookies. 

1. While we associate fortune cookies with Chinese meals, they didn't originate in China. It was in Japan that the concept originated, with cookies called tsujiura senbei, sold at new year for good luck. Tsujiura senbei are larger than the fortune cookies we know and taste different. They are flavoured with miso.
2. The distinctive taste of the fortune cookies we know comes from the ingredients of vanilla and sesame.
3. In fact, you won't find fortune cookies in China at all. They made a brief appearance there in 1989, when they were marketed as “genuine American fortune cookies”. They didn't catch on.
4. Nobody knows who adapted the tsujiura senbei into the fortune cookies you get after a Chinese meal. Fortune cookies are said to have first appeared in America in the 1890s at San Francisco’s Japanese Tea Garden. Several people have claimed to be the inventor, including David Jung of Los Angeles’ Hong Kong Noodle Company who claimed he invented them in 1918, and and Seiichi Koto, a Los Angeles restaurant owner who said he adapted the tsujiura senbei idea.
5. How are they made? Flour, sugar, vanilla, and sesame seed oil are mixed in a large tank and the mixture is squirted onto trays to be baked. At this point they are round, flat biscuits. After a minute's baking, the fortunes are added and the still soft dough is folded around them. They harden as they cool. This is another difference between fortune cookies and tsujiura senbei. In the Japanese version the fortunes are baked inside the cookes.
6. Chances are your fortune cookie was made in New York. There's a company in Brooklyn called Wonton Food, Inc. which produces 4.5 million of them a day. They use a machine called the Kitamura FCM-8006W which can make 8,000 fortune cookies per hour.
7. There are Mexican and Italian versions of the fortune cookie, too. The Mexican version of the fortune cookie is called the "Lucky Taco" and the Italian version is called the "Lucky Canoli".
8. A fortune cookie contains 107 calories, a little under a gram of fat, one milligram of cholesterol, 24 grams of carbohydrates, and 13 grams of sugar.
9. Ever wondered who wrote the fortunes? Up until 1995 it would have been Donald Lau, vice president of Wonton Food, but in 1995 he ran out of ideas and after that the company hired an official fortune writer. How many different ones are there? Wonton Food has a database of about 15,000, Yang’s Fortunes in San Francisco, has a collection of 5,000, while one bakery in Japan has a repertoire of just 23. Hence if you get a fortune which includes lucky lottery numbers, chances are if they did come up, you'd be sharing the prize with a number of other people who had a Chinese meal that week.
10. People in America sometimes amuse themselves by adding the words "between the sheets", "[except] in bed" or "in jail" to the fortune they get, to create a rude or dark version of the fortune.