22, 28, 32, 33, 39.
Those were 5 of the 6 winning numbers from the March 30, 2005 Powerball drawing. When 110 people played those numbers — a one-in-three-million combination — the lottery officials suspected fraud. How could so many people play the same numbers?
When those people showed up to claim their winnings, they all had the same story: they’d gotten the number from a fortune cookie — and it turns out, all their cookies came from the same factory in Queens which produces about half of the fortunes in fortune cookies in the U.S.
This story was one of the jumping off points for Jenny 8. Lee’s forthcoming The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, which examines the Chinese food’s propagation around the globe and how cultures add and subtract from imported ideas (to the extent that people in China even eat fortune cookies, their fortunes skew toward the critical; Americans tend to be more optimistic so their cookies’ fortunes are invariably positive).
Over the millennia, the Japanese have borrowed many concepts and inventions from the Chinese — written language, soy sauce, even chopsticks. Certain cultures tend to get credit for inventing practically everything, among them the Greeks, the Arabs, and the Chinese. Are fortune cookies an example where the cultural osmosis worked in reverse?It cannot be denied that the fortune cookie is an odd member of the Chinese dessert family. Traditional Chinese desserts, as any Chinese-American child will tell you, are pretty bad. There is a reason Chinese cuisine has a worldwide reputation for wontons, and not for pastries.
For most of our young lives, my family was baffled by elementary school bake sales, to which we were told to bring in goodies to sell. While other kids arrived bearing brownies, chocolate chip cookies, and apple pies, Chinese families didn’t bake. Even today, my Western friends who move to China are bewildered when they find that their apartments don’t have ovens. “What do you do on Thanksgiving?” one friend wailed…
The yumminess of desserts is largely dependent on two things: (1) sugar and (2) fat. In contrast, traditional Chinese desserts use little sugar and fat, and a lot of red bean and lotus, peanut and sesame, soy and almond. Even the famous Chinese moon cakes, essential to the Mid-Autumn Festival, taste a bit like the hockey pucks they resemble. I scrutinized other Chinese baked sweets — the almond cookie (which was at least a cookie) and the yellow egg roll (which was rolled, something similar to folding) — for any family resemblance to the fortune cookie. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility, but I felt like a paleontologist trying to justify a hypothesis using only vague evidence from the Cambrian period. If the Chinese had introduced the crispy, curvy, wafer-thin fortune cookie to the United States, where had they drawn their inspiration from?
Listen to an interview here.
(Disclosure thingie: Jenny is a friend/colleague of myself and April.)
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