How the Hot Dog Found Its Bun by Josh Chetwynd

writing isn’t fair. In actuality, Wakefield was a successful writer, dietitian, lecturer, and businesswoman. And, as the regularly retold story goes, besides inventing the chocolate chip cookie to overcome a cooking problem she faced in the kitchen, she also knew how to capitalize on her unplanned discovery.
    In August 1930, Ruth and her husband, Kenneth, purchased a Cape Cod–style house on the outskirts of Whitman, Massachusetts. The building was loaded with history. Erected in 1709, it had been used as a toll house and rest stop on the road between New Bedford and Boston. Drawing from history, the Wakefields turned the cozy spot into an inn, which they called The Toll House.
    Considering her mastery of the household arts, Ruth probably ran many of the day-to-day elements of the hotel, but she was without a doubt queen of the kitchen. First published in 1936, her cookbook Ruth Wakefield’s Toll House Tried and True Recipes went through some thirty-nine editions. It offers a spectrum of recipes for such tantalizing fare as onion soup, lobster thermidor, and chicken soufflé.
    But it’s her Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookies that she became most known for. Amazingly this recipe, which calls for two bars of “Nestlé’s yellow label chocolate, semi-sweet, which has been cut in pieces the size of a pea” was the first ever to include chocolate chips. That’s saying a lot because cookies, which come from the Dutch word koekje (meaning “little cake”), have a history dating back to the seventh century and chocolate bars were invented in the mid-nineteenth century.
    Why did Wakefield decide to change the destiny of the cookie? The vastly popular lore goes like this: In 1930 Wakefield was making butter cookies when she realized a key ingredient was missing (some say it was nuts, while others claim it was cooking chocolate). Either she didn’t have the time or the inclination to pop out for the missing materials so she broke up some Nestlé chocolate bars with an ice pick and used those pieces instead. Much to her surprise the combination was fantastic and she christened her find Chocolate Crispies. Another slightly simpler version states that Wakefield simply threw chocolate pieces into cookie dough on a whim, stumbling into pure cookie heaven.
    Nestlé discovered Wakefield’s work when one of its salesmen began inquiring into why their chocolate bars were selling so well in Wakefield’s town of Whitman. In 1939, Wakefield negotiated a forty-year contract with the company. That year Nestlé started selling their chocolate in “morsel” form—or as we better know them, as chips. They also printed Wakefield’s recipe on the bag and renamed the confection Toll House Cookies.
    Nestlé must have liked this tale because during the cookie’s fiftieth anniversary proceedings in 1980, the accidental discovery story was offered up (those stories were running in newspapers by at least 1955). That said, a Christian Science Monitor article that ran in 1977, the year Wakefield died, asserted that Wakefield may have been more deliberate in her efforts. According to journalist Phyllis Hanes, who reported from Whitman, Wakefield had remembered experiments from her college food chemistry classes and resolved to come up with a new treat as an alternative to her crisp pecan icebox cookies. After trial-and-error, she and her pastry cook, Sue Bridges, developed the perfect recipe. Wakefield’s own words seem to bolster this account. She once wrote, “Certainty in place of guessing eliminates failures.” This suggests she wasn’t one to haphazardly throw ingredients in a bowl and go for it.
    If the Monitor ’s story is accurate, Wakefield certainly showed a businesswoman’s smarts. It appears she never publicly contradicted the more fanciful yarn—a shrewd choice that likely sold more bags of chocolate chips for Nestlé.
     
     
    Chocolate Molten Cake (Chocolate Lava Cake): Celebrity chef flub
    Even celebrity chefs get it wrong