Fortune Cookies!!!

Chinese meal was something taste buds demanded to mark the end of this bank holiday weekend. So we decided to try out the ‘My Asia’ Chinese restaurant in Northallerton! Guess this was the only one restaurant left to try out in the high street as this one always gave the impression of a not so great place. When we decided to try our luck last night we were quite surprised and impressed by the standard of the place. The ambience was great inside and so was the quality of the products! Infact the service was great too unlike some of the Chinese places where we are expected to finish off in a hurry.

Yeah, you get for what you pay; the place is expensive! But didn’t complain much as we both enjoyed whatever we ordered. As always I had my doubts on quantity while ordering but struggled to finish off the mains after starters; so desert was sacrificed! Then comes the bumper, fortune cookies! I was seeing it for the first time and was not particularly interested, just wanted to pay and get off. SreeRaj opened his cookie and it said, "You will make many changes before settling down satisfactorily!”. And we we got interested; SreeRaj knew there was a story behind fortune cookies and asked the customer service girl about it. She said, “ No story!”. Guess she has a bit of language problem. We left the story thingy there and now I wanted to open mine though didn’t want to have it as I was so full. There comes mine ,” You will be graced by the presence of a loved one soon!”. I was like, “Woah! This is good”. Now I wanted to try it out and it tasted good too – fat free, vanilla flavour plain flour simple cookie!

We were both happy with our fortune cookies!!! And then I badly wanted to know what the story behind this is. Here it goes (from a piece of google search)

“For many centuries the Chinese have marked special occasions and festival times such as harvest and New Year with the giving and receiving of Moon Cakes these were made from Lotus Nut Paste.
During the 13th and 14th centuries China was occupied by the Mongols. When plans were made in Peking for a popular uprising to oust the invaders, much thought was given how news of the date of the uprising could be circulated without alerting the Mongols.
The story goes that the Mongols had no taste for Lotus Nut Paste and so the Chinese hid the message containing the date in the middle of their Moon Cakes replacing the yolk with secret messages. Patriotic revolutionary, Chu Yuan Chang took on the disguise of a Taoist priest and entered occupied walled cities handing out Moon Cakes. These were the instructions to co-ordinate the uprising which successfully formed the basis of the Ming Dynasty.
Thus the tradition of giving cakes with messages was born and became a popular way of expressing wishes of goodwill or good fortune on an important occasion.
The origins of the Fortune Cookie as we know it today were laid down by the Chinese 49'ers who worked on the building of the great American railways through the Sierra Nevada into California.
Work was very hard and pleasures were few in isolated camps, those hard workers had only biscuits with happy messages inside, to exchange at the Moon festival instead of traditional cakes with happy messages, thus the FORTUNE COOKIE was born. This became something of a cottage industry and as the Chinese settled in San Francisco after the railway and the Gold boom the custom continued. Today it is almost impossible to have a Chinese meal in America and Canada without finishing with a Fortune Cookie.
More and more businesses and even governments are having promotional messages printed on the opposite side to the fortune. The HONG KONG police used them in anti - drugs campaigns and the US followed.
The first automated production of Fortune Cookies took place in America in 1964 before that they were made by hand. In recent years fully automated facilities have been set up in the UK to produce Fortune Cookies that are now gaining increasing popularity in Chinese restaurants and Take-Aways across the U.K. and Europe”

Interesting!!! A good selling point too – fortune wrapped in a piece of paper! Who wouldn’t like to see pleasing things like this though you believe in it or not!