TOLL HOUSE COOKIES

Did you know the original chocolate chip cookies were called Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookies? Legend says that around 80 years ago this cookie was born at the Toll House Inn in Whitman, MA. Ruth Wakefield, the inn's proprietress and head chef, had run out of chocolate for her chocolate cookie recipe. She experimented by adding a chopped Nestle's chopped up semisweet chocolate bar to her sugar cookie recipe, or so the legend goes. She had hoped the chocolate would melt and thus she would have chocolate cookies. The chocolate didn't melt and so was born what we now know as Chocolate Chip Cookies.

George Boucher, a chef at the Toll House Inn, told a different story. He said that the vibrations of a mixer stirring up a batch of the sugar cookie dough caused a Nestle's chocolate bar to fall into the mixer where it broke into pieces. He claimed Ruth Wakefield wanted to throw the dough out but he baked the cookies. So there is version #2! Who really cares as long as we ended up with delicious chocolate chip cookies?

By 1939 the recipe had been printed in various New England newspapers. Ruth Wakefield eventually sold the recipe to Nestle in exchange for a lifetime supply of chocolate. After experimenting with scoring chocolate to be broken up, Nestle eventually came up with chocolate morsels, our current chocolate chips.

Here is the supposed original recipe: