Americans like to pride themselves on their eclectic palettes and ability to appreciate an array of foods from various foreign backgrounds.
But before you go dipping that naan into your chicken tikka masala or cracking open that fortune cookie, consider the real source of the food.
It’s no surprise that American culture has been bastardizing ethnic cuisine for years, tweaking or creating dishes with ethnic names to pawn them off as foreign. The biggest culprits are food chains like Taco Bell and PF Chang’s, where items like the “enchirito” and “General Tsao’s Chicken” are sold.
The reality is that many foods are supposedly tied to foreign lands, but really root from elsewhere. These five favorite “foreign” foods aren’t where you think they’re from.
Fortune Cookies
Ah yes, the fortune cookie—those wise little crunchy cookies whose words of wisdom we love to cherish after a hearty fare of Chinese cuisine. They certainly feel authentically Asian. The truth is that the treat hails from about seven thousand miles from China. Turns out they’re an American concoction conceived in California. A Chow.com article places thei origins in Los Angeles where baker David Jung first produced them out of his Hong Kong Noodle Company and to William T. Leong’s Key Fortune Cookie Company in New York in the early 1900s. In the late 1960s, Edward Louie, owner of the San Francisco–based Lotus Fortune Cookie Company, invented a fortune-cookie-making machine. Fortunes transitioned from biblical or Confucian adages to more frivolous offerings over time, including lottery numbers in the 1980s. Ironically, the cookies weren’t produced in China until 1993 by the Wonton Food Company.
Chimichanga
This is one of those cases where just because it sounds ethnic doesn’t mean it is. The beloved chimichanga, a staple in Tex-Mex cuisine and a popular snack, actually hails from borders of Arizona. Though its actual Arizonian origin remains up for debate, the most common legend is that it stems from Tucson’s El Charro Café and dates back to the 1920s. As the story goes, owner Monica Flin accidentally dropped a burrito into the deep-fat fryer, cursing in Spanish at her mistake, but quickly tweaking the word to form “chimichanga.” Cute story? Yes. Of Mexican origin? Not so much.
