Who Invented the Fortune Cookie?

It is impossible to go to a Chinese restaurant in North America without being offered a fortune cookie at the end of the meal.  These fortune cookies have become almost synonymous with Chinese restaurants – but according to The Book of General Ignorance, there is nothing traditionally Chinese about these cookies – in fact they were first developed by a Japanese restaurant owner in the United States.

According to the authors,  the inventor of the Fortune Cookie was Makato Hagiwara, who started the tradition in San Francisico. Soon the restaurants of China Town copied the idea and made it their own.  So much so that no one today associated fortune cookies with Japanese cuisine.

In Wikipedia it is claimed, however, that the fortune cookie might have a Chinese origin after all. According to the Wikipedia article, fortune cookies were first used in China during the Mongol occupation, by revolutionaries sending secret messages to their fellow conspirators by hiding little hand written notes in cookies.