Fortune cookies were invented in California, not China.

Fortune cookies are a fixture of American Chinese restaurants, but they have no real precedent in Chinese cuisine or history. The closest ancestor is a Japanese cracker called tsujiura senbei, folded around a paper fortune and sold near temples in Kyoto for generations before fortune cookies appeared in the United States.

Japanese immigrants in California, including bakers in San Francisco and Los Angeles, are credited with adapting the recipe and popularizing it in the early 20th century. After Japanese American communities were forced into internment camps during World War II, Chinese American businesses took over production, and the cookie became strongly associated with Chinese restaurants throughout the country, even though it remains essentially unknown in China itself.