{"id":2104,"date":"2010-06-06T20:31:10","date_gmt":"2010-06-07T00:31:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/apanews.si.edu\/?p=2104"},"modified":"2014-12-30T22:00:38","modified_gmt":"2014-12-30T22:00:38","slug":"collections-fortune-cookie-mold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/now\/collections-fortune-cookie-mold\/","title":{"rendered":"Collections: Fortune cookie\u00a0mold"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">Jennifer 8 Lee<\/a>, author of <em><a href=\"http:\/\/bookdragon.si.edu\/2008\/03\/18\/the-fortune-cookie-chronicles-adventures-in-the-world-of-chinese-food-by-jennifer-8-lee\/\" target=\"_blank\" \/ rel=\"nofollow\">The Fortune Cookie Chronicles<\/a><\/em>, not only did a splendid talk on <a href=\"http:\/\/apanews.si.edu\/2010\/04\/08\/a-conversation-with-jennifer-8-lee\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">her recent appearance<\/a> at the Smithsonian to capture the audience&#8217;s attention, but she also led us to great contacts on fortune-cookie history. One of the people she introduced to me was Gary Ono, who claims <del datetime=\"2010-07-21T17:45:45+00:00\">to have originated<\/del> <ins datetime=\"2010-07-21T17:45:45+00:00\">his grandfather helped to reformulate the flavor of a Japanese confection that led to the spread of<\/ins> the fortune cookie in the U.S. One of the mysteries of the fortune cookie is&hellip; is it Japanese, Chinese, or American? Interestingly enough, there are multiple stories to this. However, here we are going to focus on Gary Ono&#8217;s grandfather: Suyeichi Okamura, a immigrant from Japan who started Benkyodo, a Japanese confectionery store in San Francisco in 1906. <\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/now\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2010\/06\/senbei_irons_500.jpg\" alt=\"A fortune cookie mold\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Suyeichi of Benkyodo was asked to supply fortune cookies by Makoto Hagiwara, a landscape designer who ran the Japanese Tea Garden at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, California. This antique <em>sembei<\/em> iron <em>kata<\/em> (hand skillet mold) was used in the Japanese Tea Garden to hand-make the fortune cookies one at a time.<\/p>\n<p>Gary also found plain, M.H. engraved (Makoto Hagiwara\u2019s initials) and Japan Tea and Mount Fuji engraved molds, which made cookies sold at Japanese Tea Garden as tea cookies to customers. Benkyodo continued to be the Japanese Tea Garden\u2019s sole supplier of fortune cookies and other Japanese confectioneries until the outbreak of World War II. While Japanese Americans were locked up in prison camps, Chinese immigrants found this golden opportunity to start producing fortune cookies in America. Now  fortune cookies are associated with Chinese restaurants and thought to be a Chinese invention by many in the U.S. After the war, Gary remembers that his grandfather started making fortune cookies again.   <\/p>\n<p><em>Photo credit: Gary Ono<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Courtesy of Suyeichi &amp; Owai Okamura family, Benkyodo Co., San Francisco<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jennifer 8 Lee, author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, not only did a splendid talk on her recent appearance at the Smithsonian to capture the audience&#8217;s attention, but she also led us to great contacts on fortune-cookie history. One of the people she introduced to&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6785,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-updates"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2104"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2104"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8111,"href":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2104\/revisions\/8111"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}