Origins of America’s Favorite Cookie.

The history of the cookie begins in 7th century Persia where sugar cane was first grown. Bakers made early versions of cookies as a way to test the oven temperature before putting in their cakes. As travelers headed to Europe for trade in the Middle Ages, the cookie popularized in Europe and eventually to the Americas. Today one of the most popular cookies is the chocolate chip cookie. Read the origins of the chocolate chip cookie history and how the Nestle company played a role in its success.

Chocolate Chip Cookie History & Origin Story

As the story goes, the origins of the chocolate chip cookie date back to 1937 in Whitman, Massachusetts. Ruth Graves Wakefield and her husband operated the Toll House Inn where she cooked and baked for her guests. Her desserts were her specialty and she was known for pairing cookies with orders of ice cream.

One day, she ran of out chocolate for her drop cookie recipe, so she used a bar of semisweet chocolate. Rather than the chopped pieces melting throughout the batter, they kept their shape in the oven and the first batch of chocolate chip cookies was born. At that time, she named it “The Toll House Crunch Cookies” which she included in her 1938 cookbook.

The cookie was a sensation throughout the New England area to the point where Betty Crocker boasted of it in her radio show in 1939. Ruth pitched a collaboration idea to Nestle, and the company printed the recipe on the back of the Semi-Sweet Chocolate Bar which resulted in increased sales. Later that year, Nestle produced “Nestle Toll House Real Semi-Sweet Chocolate Morsels.”

Note: It’s also debated that Ruth was a seasoned baker, so to give her credit, some say she also purposefully chopped the chips for this recipe through her years of trials and errors with baking desserts. It has also been argued that the recipe and techniques existed before Ruth popularized it. There was a recipe for Chocolate Jumble, a version of the drop cookie which used chocolate shavings. Rather than the effort to manually shave the chocolate, bakers may have chopped up the chocolate into chips.

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