The Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer 8 Lee Read Free Book Online Page A

Chinese. Are fortune cookies an example where the cultural osmosis worked in reverse?
    It cannot be denied that the fortune cookie is an odd member of the Chinese dessert family.
    Traditional Chinese desserts, as any Chinese-American child wil tel you, are pretty bad. There is a reason Chinese cuisine has a worldwide reputation for wontons, and not for pastries.
    For most of our young lives, my family was baffled by elementary school bake sales, to which we were told to bring in goodies to sel . While other kids arrived bearing brownies, chocolate chip cookies, and apple pies, Chinese families didn’t bake. Even today, my Western friends who move to China are bewildered when they find that their apartments don’t have ovens. “What do you do on Thanksgiving?” one friend wailed.
    By the time I entered fifth grade we had formed our response to the bake sales: handmade fried dumplings—but with ground turkey instead of ground pork (healthier, my mom said). They were always one of the first items to sel out.
    The yumminess of desserts is largely dependent on two things: (1) sugar and (2) fat. In contrast, traditional Chinese desserts use little sugar and fat, and a lot of red bean and lotus, peanut and sesame, soy and almond. Even the famous Chinese moon cakes, essential to the Mid-Autumn Festival, taste a bit like the hockey pucks they resemble. I scrutinized other Chinese baked sweets—the almond cookie (which was at least a cookie) and the yel ow egg rol (which was rol ed, something similar to folding)—for any family resemblance to the fortune cookie. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility, but I felt like a paleontologist trying to justify a hypothesis using only vague evidence from the Cambrian period. If the Chinese had introduced the crispy, curvy, wafer-thin fortune cookie to the United States, where had they drawn their inspiration from?
    It’s fairly easy to trace fortune cookies back to World War I . By the 1940s English-language fortune cookies were already commonplace in Chinese restaurants in San Francisco and southern California.
    San Francisco was a way station for servicemen to and from the Pacific arena, and the influx of eager, bright-eyed young men during the war helped fuel the rise of the city’s flamboyant Chinese nightclubs.
    Soldiers and sailors flocked to Chinese restaurants, where they were treated with the familiar—chop suey, chow mein, egg foo yong—and the exotic fortune cookies. From California, the cookies made an accelerated postwar journey across the country.
    Convinced that these San Francisco fortune cookies were part of truly “authentic” Chinese cuisine, servicemen started demanding the treats when they returned home to the Midwest and the East Coast.
    Mystified but eager to please their customers, local Chinese restaurant owners placed orders with California cookie makers. As demand around the country grew, local entrepreneurs in major cities set up their own fortune cookie companies—
    though production stil centered in Los Angeles and San
    Francisco
    and,
    eventual y,
    New
    York.
    Customized cookies were used to announce engagements. Boxes of fortune cookies were sold on supermarket shelves.
    By the late 1950s, Americans were consuming an estimated 250 mil ion fortune cookies a year, and the little folded desserts were becoming part of popular culture. At the 1960 Democratic convention, both Senator Stuart Symington and Adlai Stevenson distributed them as part of their presidential campaign, as did Abraham Beame in his 1965 mayoral race. In 1972, as a prank, someone even presented Chicago’s Irish mayor, Richard Daley, with green fortune cookies. Companies were buying custom cookies to hawk everything from airlines to power companies, and from fish sticks to pharmaceuticals. And when Transamerica executives heard of a planned protest to their then-controversial (now-iconic)
    pyramid-shaped
    building
    in
    San
    Francisco, they greeted the protestors with fortune