The Dilemma: You find yourself at a Chinese restaurant craving cylindrical food. But of which variety?

People You Can Impress: all the folks down at Hunan Garden. Now if you could only pronounce Szechuan.

The Quick Trick: If it’s got a shell like a deep-fried tortilla, it’s probably an egg roll. And if you’re thinking that deep-frying tortillas is awfully American for Chinese food, you’re onto something.

The Explanation:
The main gustatory difference between a spring roll and its egg cousin is that spring rolls have thin, often translucent flour wrappers, while egg rolls have thicker-wrappings (they are both fried, unlike their healthier cousin the summer roll). Also, spring rolls in America are often filled with carrots and bamboo, while egg rolls are more likely to be filled with meat and bean shoots. Oh, and one other difference: Spring rolls are Chinese; egg rolls probably aren’t.

In fact, Chinese cuisine in America is so vastly different from Chinese cuisine in China that many American Chinese restaurants advertise, beneath their English names, “Westernized Food” in Chinese. In the 19th century, the primary audience for Chinese food was railroad workers, a group of people not widely known for their sophisticated palates. Chinese restaurateurs sought to accommodate both Chinese immi- grants working the rails and their white coworkers—and in doing so created “fusion cuisine” long before it was hip. While some argue that egg rolls existed in China prior to their appearance in America, many food scholars believe that the egg roll is an American original. Besides the legendary roll, there are many staples of American Chinese food you’ll rarely, if ever, see in China: fried rice, crab Rangoon, chow mein, sweet-and-sour pork, and General Tso’s chicken. Also, fortune cookies (see below). What do all these foods have in common? Frying, which is a staple of American Chinese food but somewhat less important in authentic Chinese cuisine.

As for the spring roll, though, around the late 1980s, Americans began to turn against the very Chinese food they’d helped to invent. No longer could we afford to eat high-sodium foods sprinkled with MSG. And so more authentic Chinese restaurants started popping up, bringing back the relatively healthy spring roll. American Chinese cuisine still dominates the market in small towns, but the number of authentic restaurants grows every year.

How the Fortune Cookie Crumbles
Unlike the spring roll, the fortune cookie is not Chinese. It’s actually Japanese-American. Makato Hagiwara, who designed (and for many years lived in) the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, invented the fortune cookie in the early 20th century. He intended the cookie to be a snack for people walking through the tea garden, but the concept became so popular that Chinese restaurants in San Francisco’s Chinatown stole the idea.