A Sweet Deal for Everyone
Ruth Wakefield and her husband, Kenneth, were the owners and proprietors of a restaurant and lodge in Whitman, MA in the 1930s. A trained dietitian, Ruth prepared all of the meals and baked goods served at the lodge. Located between Boston and New Bedford, the lodge was a popular eating place and tourist stop, gaining a reputation for good food, especially desserts. Although there is no evidence that the lodge, which was built in 1817, was ever used as a place to collect tolls on the Boston Post Road, the Wakefields named their business The Toll House Inn.
In 1938 Ruth was making one of her more popular dessert cookies, which were butter drop cookies, when she decided to vary a batch by adding chopped up semi-sweet chocolate. Chocolate chips had not yet been invented. Ruth expected that the chocolate would melt during the baking process, but unevenly so, resulting in butter drop cookies swirled with chocolate. The chopped chocolate did not melt, only softening during the baking, to restore itself to hardness after the cookies fully cooled. Thus the chocolate chip cookie was born in Massachusetts. Ruth published her recipe in an ensuing edition of her best-selling cookbook in which she called the cookies Toll House Cookies.
Ruth specified the use of Nestle semi-sweet chocolate in her recipe. Toll House cookies became popular in New England, and the sales of Nestle’s semi-sweet chocolate bars increased dramatically, a fact noticed by the Nestle company. World War II intervened. An urban legend has it that soldiers from New England shared their home sent care package cookies with their fellow soldiers from other areas of the country, spreading their popularity. In truth, ingredients used in the recipe, including butter, sugar, eggs, and flour were all rationed during the war, and most of the cookies distributed to troops came from commercial bakers.
Andrew Nestle and Ruth Wakefield made a deal which, while the term win-win situation was not yet in wide use, certainly qualifies as one. Nestle agreed to print the Toll House Cookie recipe on every package of their new product, chocolate chips, and Ruth received a lifetime supply of Nestle chocolate. Ruth also received one US dollar for her part of the agreement. By 1958 Nestle was capitalizing on the baby boom by introducing other flavors of their chips (actually morsels by Nestle terminology, but chocolate morsel cookie doesn’t have the same panache) starting with butterscotch.
By the 1960s there were chocolate and other flavor chips manufactured by confectioners around the world and dozens of different brands of chocolate chip cookies manufactured commercially. The original Toll House recipe became available pre-made in tubes to be simply sliced and baked. Many at home bakers ate some of the dough raw while waiting for the batch in the oven to finish, which in turn led to chocolate chip cookie dough flavored ice cream. It all stemmed from the fortuitous result of a baking experiment in a Massachusetts tourist lodge, an event which alone should rank Massachusetts as one of the greatest of the states.