Many Chinese restaurants at the end of the meal give customers the famous “Fortune biscuits“. These are thin pods that, when broken, reveal a small paper ticket on which motivational phrases or, in some cases, lucky numbers are reported. These sweets can be found in Asian restaurants throughout Europe and the USA … but why are they almost unobtainable in China and Japan? This has to do with their origin: even if there is no certainty 100%, it seems to have been invented by a Japanese cook Novecento and who, therefore, have nothing to do with the Asian tradition.
Specifically, the inventor would be Makoto Hagiwara who in the first half of the 1900s began to serve tea with fortune biscuits inside his place, the Golden Gate Park Japanese Tea Garden – still in business. It must be said, however, that his paternity is not universally shared: over time, in fact, another alleged inventor has also been ahead, the Cino-American David Tsung Jung, owner of the Hong Kong Noodle Company of Los Angeles. In fact, he claimed to have started making biscuits with the Bible phrases to be distributed to the unemployed of the city in 1918. The debate between the two became so serious that in 1983 he ended with a battle in court … or rather, to the Court of Historical Review of San Francisco. This, in reality, is not a real court, but rather an entity that deals with attributing historical truthfulness to objects and events: their verdict has no legal value. The fact is that, according to their opinion, Makoto Hagiwara would be the legitimate inventor of the fortune biscuits.
The choice of the Court is probably also linked to the fact that, actually, in Japan there is a culinary tradition that is not very different from the luck biscuits. We are talking about senbeismall round -shaped crackers made with glutinous rice and containing lucky tickets. Senbei are usually salty – even if there are many variations, even sweets – and conceptually they are not very far from the object of the dispute, making Hagiwara’s history more likely.
Regardless of their paternity, these biscuits in a short time managed to become extremely popular in the USA and, later, in Europe. In fact, the Dolcetto was rapidly adopted by numerous Chinese (and later also Japanese) restaurants as a tribute to the end of the meal, leading people to believe that this treat has an ancient and remote origin: it is actually a commercial product born in the United States and that, for this reason, it is not easily available in Asia.
