What would become America’s favorite cookie—several billion are eaten annually today—owes its very existence to a kitchen crisis at the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts. Sometime in the early 1930s, owner Ruth Wakefield, finding she was out of nuts for her cookie dough, decided to chop chocolate bars into chunks and add them instead. She expected the chocolate pieces would melt, but they stayed intact. Diners at the Inn loved the contrast of the crispness and butteriness of the cookies with the crunchy nuggets of chocolate. She named her cookies, “Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookies,” and they soon became a nationwide sensation. Eighty-four years have passed since Mrs. Wakefield’s creation of this iconic treat, and in its wake bakers have devised hundreds of versions of her original recipe. Entire books on chocolate chip cookies are in print, with all sorts of additions—macadamia nuts, pecans, white chocolate chunks, oatmeal, dried cranberries, candied ginger—to the basic dough. The recipe has also changed, with bakers substituting whole wheat flour for the white flour, adding more brown sugar, using less egg, melting the butter instead of creaming it, changing the oven temperature and baking times, and increasing the size of the cookies from tiny—Mrs. Wakefield says her recipe makes 100 cookies—to huge, 18 cookies per batch.
Fortunately, Mrs. Wakefield’s recipe survives, and here are her ingredients and instructions from Toll House Tried and True Recipes. The semisweet chocolate morsels became an ingredient in 1939 after she formed a business relationship with the Nestlé company.