The Story of the Best Cookie Ever
You may love your car, your blow dryer and bank account, but you have to admit chocolate chip Toll House cookies are the best. As you sit there pondering this over a Toll House cookie dipped in milk, you will probably be grinning, as you learn seven billion of these types of cookies are consumed each year. Out of all the homemade cookies baked in America, half of these delicious morsels are chocolate chip cookies. We certainly owe Ruth a great deal for inventing this fantastic recipe enjoyed worldwide. You are probably curious now, as to how this divine recipe came about. Let's take a look at the birth of the genuine chocolate chip Toll House cookie.
The Beginning of Toll House Cookies
The story starts out with a couple by the name of Ruth and Kenneth Wakefield back in 1930. They found themselves a beautiful old historic inn called the Toll House. The inn was very similar to todays Bed & Breakfasts, where people stop to rest and relax. Ruth and Kenneth served traditional Colonial foods typical for the times. Consequently, Ruth got a lot of practice in cooking, baking and making divine desserts. You might say she had a background in cooking.
Many fine cooks still find they must make a substitute in their recipes when they find they are simply out of an ingredient. So, back in 1937, Ruth was making a recipe for cookies called the Butter Drop Do. The recipe called for baker's chocolate, which she was out of. Now, she had a bar of Nestle Semi-Sweet Chocolate and decided to chop it up into little pieces as a substitute. So, she mixed the small chocolate pieces right into her dough, thinking they would melt and mix in the baking process.
Much to her surprise, these chocolate pieces did not in fact mix with the dough, but softened and kept their shape with a smooth chocolate flavor. Everyone at the Toll House Inn was delighted with this fantastic new recipe. So much so, her recipe found its way into the New England newspapers and the folks over at Nestle's began recording record sales for Semi-Sweet Chocolate Bars.
The Rest of the Story
Today, we call these Toll House chocolate chip cookies, but Ruth actually named them the Chocolate Crunch Cookies. From the sound of it, Ruth was mainly interested in getting a bit of credit for her new-found recipe. She worked out an arrangement with Nestle to have her recipe published on the Nestle chocolate bar package in exchange for all the chocolate she would ever want for the remainder of her life. You might say it was a sweet deal.
The historic old inn between New Bedford, Massachusetts and Boston that served as a toll and horse changing station for travelers is long since gone. In tribute to a wonderful woman with excellent baking skills, Nestle is still publishing the famous chocolate chip cookie recipe on every Toll House Morsels package. Ruth Wakefield has long since passed away, but her Toll House chocolate chip cookies will live on forever.
Tips and comments
You are only kidding yourself if you do not make a double batch of Toll House chocolate chip cookies. Go ahead and indulge yourself.
