![]() ![]() “Like Spam and Coca-Cola,” Wyman writes, “chocolate chip cookies’ fame was boosted by wartime soldier consumption. The Toll House restaurant’s gift shop alone sent thousands of cookies to uniformed servicemen abroad. Though chocolate was in short supply domestically because of the war effort, women on the home front were encouraged to use what little they had to bake cookies for “that soldier boy of yours,” as one Nestlé ad put it. Toll House cookies were a common constituent in care packages shipped to American soldiers overseas. America’s entry into the Second World War only enhanced the popularity of Wakefield’s creation. Ingesting a warm chocolate-chip cookie offered the eaters a brief respite from their quotidian woe. In a single inexpensive hand-held serving, it contained the very richness and comfort that millions of people were forced to live without in the late nineteen-thirties. Wakefield’s cookie was the perfect antidote to the Great Depression. Rather, the more plausible explanation is that Wakefield developed the chocolate-chip cookie “by dint of training, talent, hard work.” As prepared as she was, though, it is unlikely that the diligent proprietor of the Toll House could have predicted that her combination of butter, flour, sugar, nuts, and chocolate would go on to become an iconic American food, adored by adults and children, creating fortunes and spawning countless imitations and variations. Wyman argues, persuasively, that Wakefield, who had a degree in household arts and a reputation for perfectionism, would not have allowed her restaurant, which was famed for its desserts, to run out of such essential ingredients as bakers’ chocolate or nuts. In her recently published “Great American Chocolate Chip Cookie Book,” the food writer Carolyn Wyman offers a more believable, if somewhat less enchanted, telling. (A variation of this tale has Wakefield substituting the chips after running out of bakers’ chocolate.) Another even more unlikely story posits that the vibrations from an industrial mixer caused chocolate stored on a shelf in the Toll House kitchen to fall into a vat of cookie dough as it was being mixed. The most frequently reproduced story is that Wakefield unexpectedly ran out of nuts for a regular ice-cream cookie recipe and, in desperation, replaced them with chunks chopped out of a bar of Nestlé bittersweet chocolate. A set of often-repeated creation myths have grown up around the country’s favorite baked good. While we have always known the who, the where, and the when of the chocolate-chip cookie’s origins, the how and the why have remained somewhat obscure. In a bargain that rivals Peter Minuit’s purchase of Manhattan, the price was a dollar-a dollar that Wakefield later said she never received (though she was reportedly given free chocolate for life and was also paid by Nestlé for work as a consultant). On March 20, 1939, Wakefield gave Nestlé the right to use her cookie recipe and the Toll House name. Betty Crocker) featured it on her radio program. Created as an accompaniment to ice cream, the chocolate-chip cookie quickly became so celebrated that Marjorie Husted (a.k.a. ![]() ![]() ![]() The recipe, which has been tweaked over the ensuing decades, made its first appearance in print in the 1938 edition of Wakefield’s “Tried and True” cookbook. Ruth Wakefield, who ran the popular Toll House restaurant in Whitman, Massachusetts, with her husband, Kenneth, from 1930 to 1967, brought the Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookie into being in the late nineteen-thirties. Unlike the anonymous inventors of such American staples as the hot dog, the grilled-cheese sandwich, and the milkshake, the creator of the chocolate-chip cookie has always been known to us. The chocolate-chip cookie celebrated its seventy-fifth birthday this year. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |