After graduating from college, I moved to San Francisco, where I acquired a taste for Chinese food. The food is good, the portions are large, and back then the prices were cheap — important considerations for an impoverished recent graduate — and at the end of every meal you get a fortune cookie.

I never really liked the taste of these savories, a cross between desiccated cookie dough and a stale communion wafer. And the fortunes themselves are invariably trite and boring — “You will make a big trip” or “Success will soon be yours.” But serving up a little food for thought is the perfect way to end a meal. How much better, though, if the fortunes were actually provocative and interesting. The only solution, I decided, was to make my own fortune cookies.

After making a few inquiries, I found Golden Gate Fortune Cookies in Ross Alley, a dank, narrow lane off Washington Street in Chinatown. The firm’s fortune cookie factory was tiny — the entire workspace was about the size of a large kitchen — but this little establishment churned out a prodigious number of cookies. Cardboard boxes filled with them were stacked to the ceiling along all four walls, a tribute to the productivity of the two women who silently operated the machinery in opposite corners of the shop. I soon became a regular customer.

To make my fortunes, I typed all my aphorisms into two narrow columns on a standard sheet of letter paper. Then I made a couple dozen photocopies of this page and cut them up so that each aphorism was on its own rectangular strip. I stuffed these into an envelope and handed it to the man who always seemed to be standing in the doorway of Golden Gate Fortune Cookies smoking a cigarette. He, in turn, handed it to one of the two women. I then sat and watched as my fortune cookies were made.

I recently came across the sheets I used for my fortunes. Here is a photograph of the blank sheet onto which I typed my fortunes:

 

 

Each woman sat before an enormous black iron wheel, which looked like it had just fallen off a steam locomotive. The wheel, which rotated very slowly, was laid flat like a table, and its circumference was stippled with small depressions about the size of a Petri dish. As each depression came into position under a thin metal funnel, a dollop of dough squirted into it. The wheel then entered what looked like a model railway tunnel but was actually an oven, and by the time it emerged from the other side about thirty seconds later, the dough was baked into a miniature pancake, golden brown and steaming.

The women skewered each doughy medallion with a stick and lifted it from the wheel. Grabbing a fortune from a nearby tray, they swiftly inserted the aphorism into the soft, warm dough, deftly folded the cookie around it into its final croissant-like shape, and tossed it into a basket to cool. After about forty-five minutes, I walked away with one hundred of my own freshly baked fortune cookies, which I dropped into my trusty globe for distribution at the poetry performances I was giving at the time.

Here is a photograph of a sheet with my aphorisms on it:

 

And here is another sheet with my aphorisms and two aphorisms from my friend Alice Eckles:

If there were a word for every fish in the sea then a solid mass of fish the sea would be.

The slower you go the sooner you are.

 

 

At my current talks about aphorisms, I still pass around a globe and ask people to pick from it a slip with an aphorism on it. Fortune cookies not included, alas.