A turntable passes the dough through a gas oven. At one point, more than two-thirds of the fortune cookies baked in the United States were made on Yong Lee machines, which have a “Babes in Toyland” quality to them.Ī spigot squeezes dough onto round metal griddles. With the introduction of Lee’s machines, production spread throughout the country and into Canada, Mexico-even China. Up through the 1970s, most of the cookies sold in the United States came from California. “Wasted all my productive years on it,” he said. The machine now sold most widely throughout the United States was invented by Yong Lee, a Korean-born engineer in Massachusetts, who complains that it was the single worst thing that ever happened to him. Others improved Louie’s design, and the more automated cookie production became, the greater the distribution of the cookie. Louie then partnered with a local restaurant that began the tradition of serving the cookies as complimentary desserts. Whoever invented the cookies, they remained regional California oddities until 1948, when a San Francisco truck driver, Edward Louie, devised a machine that partly automated the labor-intensive process of making the flour-egg-sugar-and-water confection. Even if they are true, the similarities between the moon cakes, made from lotus nut paste and used to plan an insurrection against Mongol occupiers, and the little gold cracker that arrives on your tip tray is slight enough to melt beneath the dimmest of lights. Given the 600-odd-year gap, these seem like feeble attempts at undeserved authenticity. There are suggestions that it has antecedents among Chinese moon cakes, which carried hidden messages in the 14th century. The Chinese fortune cookie was invented in the United States sometime in the early part of the 20th century, probably by either a Japanese American gardener in San Francisco or a Chinese American cook in Los Angeles. It begins with the history and subsequent nature of the business.Īs ancient institutions go, the fortune cookie is not all that ancient. The path to fortune cookie knowledge winds through weird places, most notably a machine shop in a Boston suburb and Bob’s Typing Service in San Francisco.
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