Chocolate chip cookies

The beloved chocolate chip cookie was invented in the 1930s by Ruth Graves Wakefield. The cookie’s history long predates the United States, but the name itself comes from the early colonial period. Ruth Graves Wakefield and her husband owned a restaurant in Whitman, Massachusetts named the Toll House Inn.

The desserts served at the Toll House Inn soon became widely known. One day, Wakefield was busy in the kitchen. She was mixing up the dough for batch of her famous Butter Drop Do Cookies.

The more recent recipe Wakefield following called Baler’s Chocolate, but Wakefield had run out.

Chocolate chip cookies

Then Wakefield saw some Nestle semi-sweet candy bars on the shelf. She used an ice pick to chop the candy into small pieces. Then she stirred the pieces into the dough. According to other story, a bar of semisweet chocolate fell from a shelf above Wakefield’s work station into her industrial mixer as she was making a batch of her renowned Butter Drop Do sugar cookies.

The chocolate was broken into chunks by the electric mixer, and rather than throw out the amended dough, Wakefield and her fellow bakers decided to bake it. The cookies were a big hit that day.

The cookies Ruth had created became very popular with gustes at the inn, and soon her recipe was published in a Boston newspaper, as well as other papers in the New England area.

Soon demand for the unique cookies grew. Nestlé agreed to give Wakefield a lifetime’s supply of chocolate in return for permission to print her recipe for Toll House cookies on the wrapper of the chocolate bar.
Chocolate chip cookies