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)
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