The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (12 page)

Television is perhaps how General Tso’s name achieved recognition, but somewhere along the way General Ching’s recipe became more popular.

The name of one dish got merged with the recipe of another. Had the pupil conquered the master?

I final y met Chef Peng during an afternoon mah-jongg game in his apartment building in central Taipei. He was a tal , patrician man with white hair careful y combed in neat paral el lines. At eighty-eight, he was hard of hearing, so the conversation mostly consisted of me yel ing into his ear in Mandarin. He spoke slowly and methodical y, the way some elderly people do, as though operating in slow motion.

He recounted that he had created the original dish in perhaps 1955 or 1956, on the island of Taiwan, after the Nationalists had been ousted by the Communists. He had named it after the general because he had wanted to use a symbol of Hunan; the other great Hunan figure, Mao Zedong, was obviously persona non grata.

In careful y enunciated Mandarin, I told him that the dish known as General Tso’s chicken was now perhaps the most popular Chinese dish in al of America. In fact, I had also seen his version in Korea, the Philippines, and the Dominican Republic.

His curiosity piqued, Chef Peng asked me if I had tried General Tso’s chicken at his restaurant and if the versions in America were similar.

Unsure of how he would react, I hesitated before answering. “The American versions are sweet,” I final y said.

“Sweet?” he asked, his eyes growing wide.

He waved his hand. “The dish can’t be sweet. This isn’t the taste of Hunan cuisine. The taste of Hunan cuisine is not sweet,” he said emphatical y.

I had brought numerous pictures of General Tso’s chicken on my laptop, accumulated over months of travels across the States and beyond. I began to scrol through them, showing the rich range into which General Tso’s chicken had evolved.

Al of a sudden he pointed his finger at my screen accusingly. I looked. He was indicating the lush bed of green broccoli under the chicken. “This isn’t right,” he said. He was perplexed and asked,

“What is that doing there?” His son and I explained that the single most popular vegetable in American Chinese cuisine is broccoli. He shook his head and said General Tso’s chicken should just be served as is. It doesn’t need to rest on a bed of broccoli.

He criticized the next picture because the chilies were red instead of black. But that was a minor crime compared to the travesties in some of the other versions he saw. One was clearly made of tasteless cubes of chicken breast, instead of the succulent dark leg meat. He shook his head when he saw the baby corn and carrots in a version from Dover, New Hampshire. He would never use baby corn, he said.

He barely recognized the version that uses sesame seeds—one I had tried at a food court in the Minneapolis–St. Paul airport.

“What is that?” he asked when he saw the gooey brown chicken pieces decorated with pale flecks.

I pointed at the sign that read “General Tao’s chicken.”

He waved his hand again. “That’s not right.

This isn’t authentic.”

At the end, he spoke again. “Chinese cuisine took on an American influence in order to make a business out of it,” he said. “If you give them real authentic Chinese cuisine, Americans can’t accept it.” As he left, he told me that this was al
moming-qimiao.
Nonsense.

Then he shuffled away.

The Bean Sprout People Are in the Same Boat We Are

Once teeming with opium dens, brothels, and gambling parlors, Ross Al ey, in San Francisco’s Chinatown, has been cleansed of its lurid past.

Today, the sweet, heavy smel of opium has been replaced by the fragrant scent of vanil a, luring tourists rather than sin seekers. The al ey’s number one draw: the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Company, which shares the narrow path with a one-seat barbershop and a florist that sel s orange trees before Chinese New Year.

Day after day, two elderly Chinese women fold hot fortune cookie wafers, their fingertips toughened by years of sticky heat. They each sit next to a fortune cookie machine, and the scene is strictly Wil y Wonka meets Dickens: spigots squirt out circles of batter, which are then whisked on a conveyor belt into a dark tunnel lit by blue gas flames. The women pick up the toasted wafers emerging from the tunnel and pinch them into the familiar crescent shape as they tuck the fortune neatly inside.

Generations

of

San

Francisco

schoolchildren have fond memories of this shop.

Whenever I mentioned my fortune cookie research, my friends who grew up in the area often piped up with “Oh, have you been to the fortune cookie factory in that al eyway?”

On my first visit there, one of the women, Vivian, looked at my hands. Without slowing her tempo of stab-fold-tuck, she observed in thick Cantonese-tinged Mandarin, “Those are not a laborer’s hands.”

I examined my hands, which were holding a green steno notepad and a pen. The only cal us I have on either hand is on one middle finger, from where the pen rests as I scribble my notes. “You are lucky, because you speak English,” she murmured. “We can’t speak English. What can we do but work with our hands?”

I thought of my grandmother, whose hands were stubby and cracked from years of working along the sea, in the fields, and sel ing dumplings in the night markets in Taiwan. The last time we had seen each other, a decade earlier, she had held my young hands in her thick cal used ones. “You have an educated person’s hands,” she’d said proudly.

A sign sternly informs visitors that they must pay fifty cents before taking a picture; the bucket next to the injunction is fil ed with the quarters and dol ar bil s of tourists eager to comply. Despite its quaint appeal, the little shop is an anachronism. In reality, fortune cookies are rarely folded by hand anymore. Sleek industrial machines bake, stuff, and fold the cookies, then wrap them in plastic, with little human intervention. They can churn out 6,000 per hour, compared to 1,000 an hour each for the women in Ross Al ey.

The process was revolutionized in the early 1980s when Yong Lee, a Korean-born engineer, invented a ful y automated fortune cookie machine at the request of a Boston restaurant owner, then started a business sel ing contraptions. Later on, Lee unveiled the Fortune I I, a compact Rube Goldbergian machine that could churn out 1,500 cookies an hour.

This 2,500-pound, six-foot cube of hot steel, fans, conveyor belts, and robotic arms needed only to be fed: five pounds of flour, twenty-five pounds of sugar, a few gal ons of oil, a quart or so each of vanil a and water, and one hundred egg whites. The Fortune I I was fol owed by bigger and better machines. Sensing a lucrative market, competitors inevitably fol owed.

Now the largest, fastest fortune cookie machines come from Japan, made by the Kitamura company in Osaka, which markets an extensive line of confectionery devices. The long, sleek yel ow Kitamura machines can make 6,000 cookies an hour.

Thirty years ago, a cookie could be sold for the wholesale rate of just under a penny and a half.

With automation, and adjusted for inflation, the price of a fortune cookie has fal en more than 75 percent.

As a result, a decade-long shakeout in the fortune cookie industry has squeezed the mom-and-pop cookie manufacturers. Even the company started by the Chinese-American truck driver who turned fortune cookies from a regional oddity into a mainstream product has been driven to the edge.

Edward Louie, an immigrant from rural Guangdong Province, in southeast China, established Lotus Fortune Cookie Company in 1946 with his father and brother. An artist and a tinkerer convinced that he could always build a better mousetrap, Edward earned his place in cookie history with a machine he introduced in 1967. The increased production al owed him to sel the cookies at cheap enough prices to propel their popularity as complimentary desserts in Chinese restaurants.

The machine would slip the pieces of paper into the hot wafers as they were being folded, an improvement on the practices of the day. Up until then, Louie family members would flip and fold the cookies themselves, using a combination of fingers and chopsticks. Grandfather, grandmother, uncles, aunts, and grandchildren al pitched in with the labor-intensive work, napping under the stairwel when they were exhausted. Five-year-old children were taught to fold. A good fortune folder could do 17 cookies a minute, or about 1,000 per hour. The workers put tape on the tips of their fingers to insulate their nerve endings and protect against developing tough cal uses.

The cookies became a supermarket-shelf product. The hexagonal Lotus Fortune Cookie boxes informed customers that the cookies, “from the storied courts of the Mandarins,” had been “smuggled into San Francisco” and “baked from a stil secret imperial Chinese recipe.” As Edward admitted at the time, “We make up stories for what they are worth.

That’s part of the romance.” Among his fortune cookie innovations was the risqué fortune, which drew national media attention to Lotus. Confucius, it turned out, could say some very naughty things.

Edward never retired; returning from a visit to China in 1990, he headed straight to work, and died of a heart attack.

When I visited the Lotus Fortune Cookie Factory on Otis Street, a cavernous San Francisco machine shop, sandwiched between a glazier and an industrial rug sel er, it was nearly silent. The machines were oiled, but there was no customer demand to power them.

In contrast to the lively bustle of two decades ago, the front office now had but two people: Greg Louie, Edward’s son, and a woman who helped out with administrative duties. Greg’s cherubic uncle Chang was visiting at the time.

Lotus had almost been closed the day I visited—and shortly after my visit the factory would shut down permanently. But at that point the company stil sporadical y made custom fortune cookies, which are more profitable than the generic ones. The mass market had moved past Lotus, which was unable to match its bigger competitors’ prices.

The

company’s

risqué

fortunes

stil

remained one of its most popular lines. But Greg no longer even printed his fortunes himself. Instead, a man named Steven Yang, who also worked out of San Francisco, printed and cut the fortunes for Lotus.

Greg—with his bald head, wire-rimmed glasses, and flat American accent—resembled a wiseass, clean-shaven, updated version of Confucius.

During the Vietnam War, he’d been drafted into the army—a hazardous occupation indeed for a Chinese-American. One time another soldier in Greg’s company mistook him for a member of the Vietcong and assaulted him. Greg tried to dissuade him, saying, “Relax, guy. I’m American. Easy, easy.” When that didn’t work, he spoke in language that any American would understand: “Goddammit! Don’t shoot, motherfucker!”

Greg watched over an atrophying family business. As I interviewed him, I realized that once he retired, the company that had given birth to the mass-produced fortune cookie might cease to exist.

The culprits? The noodle companies that had become the Wal-Marts of the Chinese-restaurant-supply world. Greg lamented, “If you are just a cookie manufacturer, you are competing with noodle people.”

He said noodle companies, like Brooklyn’s Wonton Food and Los Angeles’s Peking Noodle, had moved aggressively into the fortune cookie sector, forcing razor-thin margins on the rest of the players. The noodle companies were using fortune cookies as a loss leader, he argued.

“They started making fortune cookies to add to a product line when they deliver to a restaurant.

They sel the cookies at cost. We can’t.”

Then Greg’s uncle piped up: “The bean sprout people are in the same boat we are.”

Why Chow Mein Is the Chosen Food of

the Chosen People—or, The Kosher

Duck Scandal of 1989

If the nation hadn’t been in the midst of a kosher duck shortage, Michael Mayer’s suspicions wouldn’t have been piqued when he walked into the Moshe Dragon Chinese restaurant that fateful August morning. If the crispy, sweet taste of Peking duck hadn’t become de rigueur for upscale Jewish house parties in suburban Washington, D.C., there might not have been such an unmet appetite for kosher duck, leading to the kind of temptations that arise when demand outstrips supply.

If al this had not been so, the Great Kosher Duck Scandal of 1989 might have been averted and the community’s faith in its religious leaders might not have been shaken. Reputations might not have been sul ied, careers might not have been derailed, and cover-ups might not have been al eged. Moshe Dragon might even stil exist today, hosting bar mitzvahs and catering celebratory Shabbat dinners.

But “if” is a word upon which history pivots into hypothesis. What happened happened. In a community fil ed with long memories and short tempers, the effects stil reverberate today.

Until the spring of 1989, there was one—and only one

—farm in the entire country that produced kosher ducks: Moriches Duck Farm, on the East End of Long Island.

In the region’s heyday of the 1950s and 1960s, there had been dozens upon dozens of family duck farms on the East End, responsible for some 75