8 Foods That Don't Come From Where You Think

The fortune cookie, the wisest of all desserts far more insightful than dumbass slanderous cake, the cake is a lie! The fortune cookie is a staple of Chinese food, light enough to still eat after a course of very heavy food but still heavy enough to hold down your bill. It's very critical that the cookie comes with the bill. So it may come as a shock that the cookie is just about as Chinese as the Canadian men's hockey team, in that it's not very Chinese at all.

The modern fortune cookie was invented in San Francisco 1906 when a Japanese immigrant started a confectionary store called Benkyodo but the fortune cookie isn't American either as it's origins go even further back than the early 1900s. The earliest reference to the scholar of all deserts comes from Japan where the originals were savoury and much larger than what we're used to. Larger is putting it lightly Tsujiura Senbeias their called in Japan are roughly the size of a baby's head. Apart from the size and flavour they are the same product including a small paper of wisdom in the centre.

Why the fortune cookie became tied to Chinese cuisine is actually quite sad, in the 1940s when many Japanese-Americans were sent to interment camps it created a gap in the market and allowed Chinese-Americans to widely produce and sell the product.