Crack open a fortune cookie in Beijing and you will mostly get confused looks. The golden wafer served by the billions at Chinese-American restaurants in the United States, Canada, and Australia is essentially unknown in China. This episode traces its true roots to 19th-century Kyoto, where tsujiura senbei, larger, darker, sesame-and-miso flavored crackers tied to the omikuji fortune tradition, were sold near shrines like Fushimi Inari, with the paper fortune pinched into the outer fold rather than sealed inside.

The episode follows the cookie across the Pacific with Japanese immigrants and into a bitter California rivalry: Makoto Hagiwara of San Francisco’s Japanese Tea Garden and the Benkyodo bakery versus Los Angeles claimants David Jung of the Hong Kong Noodle Company and Seiichi Kito of Fugetsu-do, a dispute staged as a 1983 mock trial in San Francisco. It explains how the 1942 internment of Japanese Americans emptied the market and let Chinese manufacturers take over, how Edward Louie’s late-1960s folding machine replaced 15-second chopstick folding, and how Wonton Food in Brooklyn now turns out more than 4.5 million cookies a day.

• Why fortune cookies were called fortune tea cakes until the 1940s
• The 2005 Powerball drawing in which 110 people won using the same cookie’s lucky numbers
• The failed 1992 attempt to sell fortune cookies in mainland China as too American
• What the clunky Chinese translations of the name reveal about its origin
• Spin-offs like the Lucky Taco and lucky cannoli built on the same formula