A Really Good Cookie
Reported to be America’s favorite cookie (half of the cookies baked in American homes are chocolate chip), this national obsession started out as a mistake. In the 1930’s, Ruth Wakefield, of Whitman, Massachusetts, was running a B & B, the Toll House Inn. One evening she experimented to make a chocolate butter drop cookie. Fresh out of baker’s chocolate, she broke up a bar of semisweet chocolate that had been a gift from Andrew Nestlé of the Nestlé Chocolate Company. The dark chocolate did not melt as expected, but the cookies tasted delicious so she served them anyway. They were SO good, in fact, that she made them over and over, had the recipe published in several newspapers, and struck a deal with Nestlé that they could put her recipe on their bars only if they supplied her with free chocolate for her cookies at the inn. The company originally supplied a small chopper in the package to make it easy for home cooks to break the chocolate for the recipe but, in 1939, the chocolate chips that we know today were invented.
TIP: Always use real butter (we prefer unsalted). Choose semisweet (dark) morsels over milk or other varieties.
good cookie
I would really love to find a great peanut butter cookie recipe...any ideas?
Lise Adkins
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I've been enjoying Loulie's! Do you know about the distinctive chocolate chip cookies that used to be made and sold from the old YWCA downtown? People would line up around the block for them. The cook never divulged her recipe, and some food writers claimed that part of what made the cookies unusual was that they were baked in an old cast iron stove -- something none of us could replicate. In the 70's-80's, there were food section articles containing attempts at the recipe. The last one I clipped claimed to have gotten the recipe exactly right, but it was NOTHING like it at all. I don't know why I'm writing all this, since probably no one -- like me -- could recognize the cookie anymore even if handed a bag of the real thing! However, it was the best chocolate chip cookie ever -- a very thick, scone-like texture.