Why do Chinese restaurants give you fortune cookies?
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While not traditionally part of Chinese cuisine, American customers expected some sort of dessert. So out of necessity, fortune cookies offered Americans something familiar with an exotic flair, while still being economical for the Chinese vendors.
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.
What is the fortune cookie rule?
THE instructions on the red wrapper are very explicit: (1) Open the packaging. (2) Use both hands to break open the fortune cookie. (3) Retrieve and read the fortune. (4) Eat the cookie.
Are fortune cookies part of Chinese New Year?
All fortune cookies are individually wrapped, and contain Chinese New Year Fortunes.
Donald Lau
If you’ve ever cracked open a fortune cookie, there’s a good chance you might have encountered the wit of 68-year-old Donald Lau. Having written thousands of fortunes, Lau sometimes reshapes familiar adages.
While Chinese restaurants all over the world serve fortune cookies, the ones in China don’t. In fact, the concept is so foreign, says TIME, that when Wonton Food Inc., one of the biggest purveyors of fortune cookies, tried to do business in China in the 1990s, diners kept eating the fortunes by mistake.
Are fortune cookies made to be eaten?
You have to eat the entire cookie in order for the fortune (that came from the cookie) to come true.
Can you tell others your fortune cookie?
After reading the fortune, you must not tell anyone your fortune, and then eat your fortune cookie and put paper on fire for it to come true. 7.) If there is no fortune in a fortune cookie, it is a sign that something good will happen to you soon. (Because fortune-cookie-fairy owes you one fortune.)
Today, most of the fortune cookies in the United States are made by Wonton Food, Inc., which has factories in Brooklyn, New York; La Vergne, Tennessee; and Houston, Texas. Each day, Wonton Food churns out a whopping four million fortune cookies.