Claims to original fortune cookies crumble under weight of research

It's too bad you can't just crack open a fortune cookie and find out who invented the fortune cookie. Then there wouldn't be a controversy.

Oddly enough, no Chinese cities claim the honor, but a couple of American burgs do: those feuding cousins, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

L.A. boosters have long held that the folded vanilla wafer was invented in 1918 by an Angeleno named David Jung, founder of Hong Kong Noodle Co.

One version reported by American Heritage magazine in 2005 said Jung handed out "rolled-up pastries containing scriptural passages to unemployed men."

Another version has Jung creating the cookies not as desserts, but as appetizers for restaurateurs to serve customers impatiently waiting for their orders.

San Franciscans, on the other hand, argue that the distinction belongs to a gardener named Makota Hagiwara, who was the long-ago superintendent of the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park.

"Around 1907, the story goes, Hagiwara was fired by an anti-Japanese mayor and then rehired after a public outcry," American Heritage said. "In gratitude he gave his supporters cookies with thank-you messages inside." The messages were in Japanese.

So stubborn are the two sides that the matter has gone to court -- well, sort of.

In 1983, the Court of Historical Review in San Francisco agreed to attempt to look into the past and settle the dispute.

A tribunal presided over by an actual judge, the court occasionally tackles issues relating to the proud -- perhaps too proud -- history of the City by the Bay.

Lest you think the fortune cookie fracas too trivial for such a body, keep in mind that the court has also deliberated on whether San Francisco bagels are as good as New York bagels: Absolutely, it said. It ruled on whether Mark Twain was correct in saying that the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco: Absolutely not, it said. And it decided whether San Francisco -- not the nearby city of Martinez -- invented the martini: We'll drink to San Francisco, the court said.

During the fortune cookie trial, a sort of "Perry Mason" moment occurred when a local city employee pulled out a set of round black iron grills and declared that "they were originally used by the Hagiwara family to cook the fortune cookies," wrote Jennifer 8. Lee (yes, the lucky "8." is her middle-name symbol) in her irreverent new book, "The Fortune Cookie Chronicles -- Adventures in the World of Chinese Food."

There was further drama when a fortune cookie was introduced as evidence -- a fortune cookie with a message reading, "S.F. judge who rules for L.A. not very smart cookie."

Grounds for a mistrial? Not in the Court of Historical Review.

The judge decided in favor of San Francisco.

But the matter didn't end there, as any fortune-cookie writer could have predicted.

"Los Angeles boosters ignored his decision, considering it as legitimate as a Dodgers-Giants game officiated by San Francisco sandlot umpires," American Heritage said.

Some years later, the Otis College of Art and Design, for instance, presented a list of 50 "interesting" things born in the L.A. area. It named fortune cookies along with the strapless bra, valet parking and tooth-whitening toothpaste. Of course, Otis is in the L.A. area.

More recently, the controversy took a surprising turn toward the Far East.

Lee discovered that, a few years ago, Yasuko Nakamachi, a researcher at a Japanese university, visited Kyoto and found "a number of small family-run Japanese bakeries selling cookies with a familiar shape."