WATCH: How Japanese Americans Were Forced Into Concentration Camps During WWII But, says Lee, several other sources have also claimed to invent the cookie around the same time, including three Los Angeles-based immigrant-run businesses: Fugetsu-Do confectionary in the city’s Little Tokyo, Japanese snack manufacturer Umeya and the Hong Kong Noodle Company.ħ Mysterious Mass Illnesses That Defied Explanation The Tea Garden sourced their cookies from a local bakery called Benkyodo, which claims to have pioneered the vanilla and butter flavoring and to have invented a machine sometime around 1911 to mass-produce the cookies. One of the most oft-repeated origin stories of the American fortune cookie cites the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park as the first known U.S. Japanese bakers set up shop in places such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, making miso and sesame-flavored “fortune cookie-ish” crackers, among other treats. Lee says the fortune cookie likely arrived in the United States along with Japanese immigrants who came to Hawaii and California between the 1880s and early 1900s, after the Chinese Exclusion Act’s expulsion of Chinese workers left a demand for cheap labor. Nakamachi also uncovered storybooks from 1878 with illustrations of an apprentice who worked in a senbei store making the tsujiura senbei, along with other kinds of crackers. Lee cited Japanese researcher Yasuko Nakamachi, who said she found these cookies at a generations-old family bakery near a popular Shinto shrine just outside of Kyoto in the late 1990s. The Japanese cracker, Lee wrote, was larger and darker, made with sesame and miso instead of the vanilla and butter used to flavor fortune cookies found in modern Chinese restaurants in America.

Fortune cookie writer