07 Dec Before there were chocolate chips…

My brother in law came across this book recently. If you know anything about Ruth Wakefield, you know that she is the inventor of the chocolate chip cookie. She was also a dietitian. She and her husband owned and operated a tourist lodge called the Toll House Inn and……

In 1930, Wakefield was mixing a batch of cookies for her roadside inn guests when she discovered that she was out of baker’s chocolate. She substituted broken pieces of Nestle’s semi-sweet chocolate, expecting it to melt and absorb into the dough to create chocolate cookies. That didn’t happen, but the surprising result helped to make Ruth Wakefield one of the 20th century’s most famous women inventors. When she removed the pan from the oven, Wakefield realized that she had accidentally invented “chocolate chip cookies.”

At the time, she called her creations “Toll House Crunch Cookies.” They became extremely popular locally, and the recipe was soon published in a Boston newspaper. As the popularity of the Toll House Crunch Cookie increased, the sales of Nestle’s semi-sweet chocolate bars also spiked. Andrew Nestle and Ruth Wakefield decided to come up with an agreement. Nestle would print the Toll House Cookie recipe on its package, and Wakefield would be given a lifetime supply of Nestle chocolate. Due to this unexpected discovery by a famous woman inventor, the chocolate chip cookie became the most popular variety of cookie in America, a distinction it still holds to this day. (www.women-inventors.com)

If you look closely at the ingredients, you’ll see that it calls for 2 bars of semi-sweet chocolate, cut into pieces the size of a pea. Aren’t chocolate chips just so much more convenient nowadays?