Chinese American food folkways

[raacluse]

It seems that Jennifer 8. Lee

http://www.imgplace.com/directory/dir2928/1194375203.jpg (http://www.imgplace.com/image.php?img=directory/dir2928/1194375203.jpg)

http://www.imgplace.com/directory/dir2928/1194375314.jpg (http://www.imgplace.com/image.php?img=directory/dir2928/1194375314.jpg)

is about to do a book tour to promote her book about Chinese food and America (http://www.twelvebooks.com/books/fortune_cookie.asp).

examiner.com's DC bloggers(Yeas and Nays (http://www.examiner.com/blogs/Yeas_and_Nays))
talked to her (over the phone?) Nov. 5 and seem to have (mis)reported an error or two:


Jenny 8. Lee is back

Chinese Food

Jennifer 8. Lee is The New York Times reporter who became famous around town a few years ago for her cool byline, Washington navel-gazing articles like “Washington Talk: If You’re Not Invited, You’re Not Alone” and her Katharine-Graham-for-the-young-set parties (which ultimately got her in hot water with her landlord, thanks to some damage to the condo).

Lee headed back to New York at the end of 2004, but she’s out with a new book — “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food.”

She told Yeas & Nays on Monday that Sen. Chuck Schumer and George H.W. Bush are huge Chinese food fans, and reminded us that the Clinton, Md., building in which the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln was planned is now — you guessed it — a Chinese restaurant (Wok & Roll). Lee’s personal favorite local Chinese restaurant is New Fortune Chinese Restaurant in Gaithersburg. Lee plans to host a book party at the Library of Congress sometime in the next few months and another one out West at the Nixon Library (given Tricky Dick’s China connection)...

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In the preceding text, the Surratt house in Clinton, Md is being confused with the former Surratt boarding house in DC Chinatown. The former is where Booth briefly stopped as he fled DC. The latter is where the assassination conspirators had meetings.

To further clarify DC urban history, the boarding house neighborhood did not become Chinatown until the 1930's. Not sure when the boarding house became a Chinese restaurant, but it had a different name (different owner/management) before Wok & Roll.)

[raacluse]

J8 reports on the origins of the fortune cookie:

Solving a Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside a Cookie
16 Jan 08 / J. Lee / NYT

Some 3 billion fortune cookies are made each year, almost all in the United States. But the crisp cookies wrapped around enigmatic sayings have spread around the world. They are served in Chinese restaurants in Britain, Mexico, Italy, France and elsewhere. In India, they taste more like butter cookies. A surprisingly high number of winning tickets in Brazil's national lottery in 2004 were traced to lucky numbers from fortune cookies distributed by a Chinese restaurant chain called Chinatown.

But there is one place where fortune cookies are conspicuously absent: China.

Now a researcher in Japan believes she can explain the disconnect, which has long perplexed American tourists in China. Fortune cookies, Yasuko Nakamachi says, are almost certainly originally from Japan.

Her prime pieces of evidence are the generations-old small family bakeries making obscure fortune cookie-shaped crackers by hand near a temple outside Kyoto. She has also turned up many references to the cookies in Japanese literature and history, including an 1878 image of a man making them in a bakery - decades before the first reports of American fortune cookies.

The idea that fortune cookies come from Japan is counterintuitive, to say the least. "I am surprised," said Derrick Wong, the vice president of the largest fortune cookie manufacturer in the world, Wonton Food, based in Brooklyn. “People see it and think of it as a Chinese food dessert, not a Japanese food dessert,” he said. But, he conceded, “The weakest part of the Chinese menu is dessert.”

Ms. Nakamachi, a folklore and history graduate student at Kanagawa University outside Tokyo, has spent more than six years trying to establish the Japanese origin of the fortune cookie, much of that at National Diet Library (the Japanese equivalent of the Library of Congress). She has sifted through thousands of old documents and drawings. She has also traveled to temples and shrines across the country, conducting interviews to piece together the history of fortune-telling within Japanese desserts.

Ms. Nakamachi, who has long had an interest in the history of sweets and snacks, saw her first fortune cookie in the 1980s in a New York City Chinese restaurant. At that time she was merely impressed with Chinese ingenuity, finding the cookies an amusing and clever idea.

It was only in the late 1990s, outside Kyoto near one of the most popular Shinto shrines in Japan, that she saw that familiar shape at a family bakery called Sohonke Hogyokudo.

“These were exactly like fortune cookies,” she said. “They were shaped exactly the same and there were fortunes.”

The cookies were made by hand by a young man who held black grills over a flame. The grills contain round molds into which batter is poured, something like a small waffle iron. Little pieces of paper were folded into the cookies while they were still warm. With that sighting, Ms. Nakamachi’s long research mission began....

(link (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/16/dining/16fort.html?_r=1&oref=slogin) to the article)

...end of the article:

...Ms. Nakamachi is still unsure how exactly fortune cookies made the jump to Chinese restaurants. But during the 1920s and 1930s, many Japanese immigrants in California owned chop suey restaurants, which served Americanized Chinese cuisine. The Umeya bakery distributed fortune cookies to well over 100 such restaurants in southern and central California.

“At one point the Japanese must have said, fish head and rice and pickles must not go over well with the American population,” said Mr. Ono, who has made a campaign of documenting the history of the fortune cookie through interviews with his relatives and by publicizing the discovery of the kata grills.

Early on, Chinese-owned restaurants discovered the cookies, too. Ms. Nakamachi speculates that Chinese-owned manufacturers began to take over fortune cookie production during World War II, when Japanese bakeries all over the West Coast closed as Japanese-Americans were rounded up and sent to internment camps.

Mr. Wong pointed out: “The Japanese may have invented the fortune cookie. But the Chinese people really explored the potential of the fortune cookie. It’s Chinese-American culture. It only happens here, not in China.”

That sentiment is echoed among some descendants of the Japanese immigrants who played an early role in fortune cookies. “If the family had decided to sell fortune cookies, they would have never done it as successfully as the Chinese have,” said Douglas Dawkins, the great-great-grandson of Makoto Hagiwara. “I think it’s great. I really don’t think the fortune cookie would have taken off if it hadn’t been popularized in such a wide venue.”