Chocolate Funk - Chocolate Chip Cookie

Chocolate Chip Cookie

The chocolate chip cookie is born

In 1930, Ruth Wakefield, the owner of a bed and breakfast called the Tollhouse Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts was making the same cookies that she often did for her guests when she realized that the chocolate she needed for the recipe had been finished. She also had a little store within the bed and breakfast and from there she took a bar of Nestle's semi-sweet chocolate as a substitute. She crushed the bar into chips and added it to the mixture. She did so thinking that the chocolate would melt evenly into the cookie. But those chips were stubborn and remained in form inside the cookies. Upon completion she did not really like the result because the chocolate had not completely melted and it made them a bit more lumpy and bumpy than she liked. But, she had made them and decided to serve them to her guests anyway. And so the first chocolate chip cookie was tried and tested.

And the people said it was good

I am sure that you can guess how the chocolate chip cookie was received by Mrs. Wakefield's guests. That's right, they all loved them. So much so that there quickly came a great many requests for the recipe. More and more people were making the chocolate chip cookie for their own families. As the recipe circulated and increased in popularity, so too did the sales of Nestle's semi-sweet chocolate bars!

Nestle cuts a deal

The chocolate chip cookie caught on across the country like wildfire. Nestle could hardly keep up with the demand for their bars that were still being broken into pieces to put into cookies. By 1939, Nestle began making what we know today as chocolate "morsels", made specifically for Ruth Wakefield's recipe. Shortly thereafter she struck a deal with Nestle- she would allow them to put her Tollhouse Cookie recipe on the back of their packages of chocolate morsels and she would receive a lifetime supply of Nestle chocolate. And the rest, as they say, is chocolate chip cookie history!