Chocolate Chip

Cookies

Have you ever eaten some Chocolate Chip

cookies?

Did you know that this is one of the most

traditional American confections ever?

Ruth Graves Wakefield is who invented

chocolate chip cookies.

You may have never heard of the name before today, but now you can sing her praises every time you bite into

one of these pieces of confectionary

genius.

In 1933, Ruth and her husband Kenneth were running the Toll House Inn, a tourist lodge, in

Whitman, Massachusetts.

Ruth cooked for all of their roadside guests.

She prepared the recipes for the meals herself, and started

gaining local notoriety because of her

desserts.

One of her favorite recipes was for Butter Drop Do Cookies. The

recipe called for Baker’s chocolate.

One day she had begun making some

cookies for her guests when she realized that she

was out of Baker’s chocolate.

She had on hand some Nestlé’s Semi-Sweet

Chocolate bars, which she cut into bits and

used as a substitute in her recipe.

However, unlike the Baker’s chocolate, the chocolate bits did not melt completely, the

small pieces only softened.

Thank heavens Ruth decided to serve

the cookies anyway, and history was

made!

The cookies were an instant hit, and gained

notoriety after the recipe was published

in a Boston newspaper

At the time, they were called Toll

House Chocolate Crunch Cookies.

As the cookies became popular, sales of

Nestlé’s Semi-Sweet Chocolate bars

increased.

So Andrew Nestlé and Ruth Wakefield

struck a deal.

Nestlé would have the right to publish Ruth’s

recipe, and Ruth would have a lifetime supply

of chocolate.

So, another piece of American Food History

was made.

Nestlé put in the market the Toll House

Chocolate Chips, which is, to this day,

synonymous with chocolate chip cookies.

There’s nothing better than warm chocolate chip cookies with a glass of cold milk!

There are now many different recipes for

chocolate chip cookies, but the feelings this

tasty little confection evokes in all

Americans, children and adults alike, is always the same.

It tastes of home and loving memories.

You can’t possibly think of America and not

think of Chocolate Chip cookies. So it is that some seven billion

chocolate chip cookies are consumed in the US

every year!

Now let’s say “Thank you, thank you, Ruth

Wakefield, for not dumping those messed up cookies in the trash

that day!!”

Now, if you want the recipe for the Original Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookies, you, or

your parent, can come to our first Cooking

Class and we will make some!

(produced by Monica Cardoso and Alice Bello)