A grad student from Kanagawa University may have cracked the great riddle of Asian cuisine: the origin of the Fortune Cookie! As the NY Times reports, the original fortune cookies may have been produced by Kyoto-area confectioners in the late 1800s.¹ The practice — and the distinctive iron grills used to make the sembei crackers, which are part of the historical puzzle — spread to Japanese-owned Chop Suey houses in San Francisco.² From there, Chinese-owned restaurants began to offer them, and Chinese-owned bakeries supplied them.

Then came WWII, which changed everything.

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.
…
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.”

The war also served to popularize the fortune cookie

they were encountered by military personnel on the way back from the Pacific Theater. When these veterans returned home, they would ask their local Chinese restaurants why they didn’t serve fortune cookies as the San Francisco restaurants did.

The cookies rapidly spread across the country. By the late 1950s, an estimated 250 million fortune cookies were being produced each year by dozens of small Chinese bakeries and fortune cookie companies. One of the larger outfits was Lotus Fortune in San Francisco, whose founder, Edward Louie, invented an automatic fortune cookie machine. By 1960, fortune cookies had become such a mainstay of American culture that they were used in two presidential campaigns: Adlai Stevenson’s and Stuart Symington’s.

It’s such an American tale. It’s all there: entrepreneurship, food, racism, migration, war, marketing, invention, industrialization and orientalism.³ I can’t wait to tell my students.

(Crossposted, of course)

1. I’m immediately reminded of the rickshaw, which everyone associates with China but which was actually invented as the jinrikisha in Japan at the opening of the Meiji era. There is evidence in the Times article going back to the early 1800s, though.
2. Japanese in North America were much more likely to be from Kansai than Japanese in Hawai’i
3. Also the obsession with national origins, Japanese-Chinese competition, the value of open archives, the historiography of food culture and the power of media to shape a historical finding.

The New York Times has been on a Japanese culture kick this week which I just couldn’t let pass without note. There have been not one, but two articles in praise of Sushi, and an appreciation for a Roots Kabuki troupe on tour in the US.

On the eating side of things, Trevor Corson (yes, that Trevor Corson) argues that if you’re going to eat sushi, eat it like a Japanese, or at least like Japanese used to:

When I lived in Tokyo, eating sushi generally involved a trip to a tiny neighborhood sushi bar. The chef, like a good bartender, knew everyone by name and bantered with his customers while he worked. Instead of tables and menus, people sat at the bar and asked what was seasonal and most flavorful. The chef delivered a delightful variety — unpretentious little fish with great character, crunchy clams, surprisingly tender octopus.

When sushi took root in the United States in the 1970s, a few Japanese chefs tried to educate Americans about the variety of seafood eaten in traditional sushi, and a few made the effort to recreate the neighborhood sushi bar, with its cheerful chatter, trusting relationships, lack of menus and reasonable prices.

But the dirty little secret of American sushi is that from the beginning, many Japanese chefs assumed that we could never appreciate the wide-ranging experience the way their Japanese customers did, so they didn’t bother to educate us. Simple sushi took over, featuring the usual suspects: tuna, salmon, boiled shrimp.

Today, most Americans remain wary of the stern-faced sushi chef, and dare not sit at the bar — we wouldn’t know how to order or to control the bill. Many chefs, in turn, tell me that they’re fed up with the way we Americans mishandle our sushi, so they don’t bother to serve us the fun, flavorful and more peculiar toppings.

So Americans are stuck between chef-driven omakase meals at elite restaurants that cost a fortune and the cheap, predictable fare at our neighborhood places. Both extremes have deepened our dependence on tuna — at the high end, on super-fatty cuts of rare bluefin; and at the low end, on tasteless red flesh that has often been frozen for months and treated with chemicals to preserve its color.

The dirty little secret of Japanese sushi is that a lot of Japanese eat sushi the same way that Americans do: ordering set plates, even take-out sushi that depends on fatty and salty flavors to drive business. The second dirty little secret is that the supposedly wide-ranging palates of Japanese sushi consumers have been trained since childhood to eat everything they’re given without showing favor; perfect for the Japanese restaraunt business in which the customer determines how much they want to pay, their status, instead of what they want to eat.

Corson is backed up by Steven Shaw, who argues that Japanese public health advice is better and that the conventional US warnings about pregnant women consuming raw fish are unwarranted. Most of the danger, he says, comes from raw shellfish, and if you avoid that — and go easy on potentially mercury-heavy fatty fish — then sushi is good for you. It’s nice to know that we didn’t take any excessive risks when my wife was pregnant, though you never feel good about ignoring “best practice” advice.¹

Continuing the “I knew that, doesn’t everyone?” theme comes a review of the Heisei Nakamura-za troupe — led by Nakamura Kanzaburo XVIII — which is trying to revive the flagging fortunes of Kabuki

But as the scion of a theatrical dynasty that goes back to the 17th century — the numeral behind his name indicates his place in an unbroken line of masters — he feels the lure of Kabuki as it was in its rough-and-tumble early days, when its very name meant off-kilter, out of the box, strange and new. It was a rowdy, plebeian entertainment then, not some cultural treasure. In 2000 Mr. Kanzaburo [sic] founded the troupe Heisei Nakamura-za to strike the old spark.

“Please don’t misunderstand,” Mr. Kanzaburo [sic] said recently from Tokyo, through a translator. “It’s not that I dislike the classical Kabuki. I love the classics, and they are important. Also, I don’t believe you can be a Kabuki actor unless you have mastered the classics. I don’t want to aspire to new directions by denying the classics.”

This is Mr. Nakamura‘s second US tour, and he’s been tweaking things to engage US audiences — showing whole plays instead of excerpts, inserting English dialogue, encouraging crowd commentary — in both his tours. The work he’s showing seem quite classical — well, late classical — in tone, including sex, violence, disguise and SWAT teams….

Update: The troupe’s presentation of a kabuki comedy got a great review, too.

1. though, as anyone who’s read a guide to pregnancy lately can tell you, there’s a lot of goofiness masquerading as “best practices” and it’s very hard to take it all seriously after a while

Apparently, some English class at a Japanese university is exploring the Anglophone Blogosphere in search of pen pals and practice. (This is the closest thing to a meme you’re probably ever going to get on this blog.) This was mine:

Dear Jonathan Dresner

Hello! My name is N.M. I’m a Japanese student. I’m going to school to K. University in Japan. I found your e-mail address in your blog (http://www.froginawell.net/japan/category/food/). Now, I’m researching about Japanese food in foreign country. I thought you might be able to help me. I want to ask you three questions about Japanese Food. I’m sure you’re very busy, but could I ask you questions? It won’t take long.

1. What Japanese foods do you like?
2. What image do you have of Japanese foods?
3. Why and how has Japanese Food Boom occurred in foreign countries? If you know, please tell me.

I hope to hear from you.

Sincerely
N. M.

And here’s what I wrote back:

Dear Naoki,

I’ve lived in Japan for over three years, altogether, and I just took my family out for sushi tonight, here in Hilo. Hawai’i has a large Japanese immigrant population, and lots of Japanese tourists, so there is lots of great Japanese food here.

1. What Japanese foods do you like?

Sushi, obviously. Our favorite sushi shop here has a spiced tuna roll with macadamia nuts which is excellent, and lots of rolls with avocado, which grows here. I’m also very, very fond of unagi.

I’m also a great fan of okonomiyaki, but there’s only one okonomiyaki restaraunt that I know of in the United States. Fortunately, it’s in Honolulu, so I’ve gotten to eat it recently.

I never turn down tempura, or katsu, and we make Japanese-style curry rice at home about once a month. Here in Hawai’i, we combine a kind of futomaki O-nigiri with Spam to make “musubi.” I miss umeboshi onigiri, though.

2. What image do you have of Japanese foods?

Lots. I’ve been in dirty little noodle shops and shiny yakitori bars and beautiful tempura places and chanko-nabe restaraunts with tegata on the walls. I’ve eaten satsumaimo from a cart and roast corn at a local festival, and Mosburgers. I’ve eaten fish fresh from the ocean in ryokan and cool tofu at Kiyomizudera.

3. Why and how has Japanese Food Boom occurred in foreign countries?

People like variety. New foods are fun! Japanese food has some very new and different tastes. Some foods, like Sushi and tempura, are very adaptable, very easy to enjoy. I’m still hoping for an okonomiyaki boom, though.

Best of luck with your English class!

I’m not sure if that was the kind of response he was looking for….

Japanese food is, as I’ve said before, one of the great contributions to world food culture. But nothing remains “pure,” even if it was in some sense pure to begin with. Our favorite sushi place here in Hilo features lots of avocado-filled futomaki, poké (marinated sashimi, basically, available in a wide variety of styles and flavors, and destined to become Hawai’i's most distinctive contribution to world food) as a side dish and in sushi (the rice-side-out poké sushi rolled in crushed macadamia nuts is my wife’s top pick) and one of my personal favorites is the Green Bay roll, with smoked salmon, cream cheese and asparagus.

Nothing brings out creativity like food. And nothing drives creativity in food like the restaraunt market, in which responding to local tastes frequently trumps purity of spirit or style (though “purity” is often a valuable market niche as well). So it was with little surprise that I learned that Israeli sushi [gracious half-bow to Jonathan Edelstein] is moving in its own directions.