“Flavor your cooking with ingenuity. Don’t be afraid to add a pinch of this or a dab of that. Taste as you create.”
Myths are often more exciting than facts. That may explain why the story of Ruth Graves Wakefield’s 1938 creation of a chocolate chip cookie is surrounded by myth. Two years after the future cookie inventor married Kenneth Donald Wakefield in 1930, they opened a restaurant. “Ken and I would go out to eat from time to time and we’d usually be disappointed. We would question why you could never have soup without paying extra but you’d get a dessert you wouldn’t want,” she told a reporter years later as quoted in Carolyn Wyman’s The Great American Chocolate Chip Cookie Book.
Wakefield and her husband had good reasons to be judgmental. Ken was an executive in a meat-packing plant, and Wakefield, a graduate of the Framingham State School of Household Arts (now Framingham State University) had been a hospital dietitian and high school home economics teacher. In August 1930, they bought a small house on the corner of Bedford and Auburn Streets in Whitman, Massachusetts on Route 18, a back road from Boston to New Bedford, Massachusetts.
Wakefield claimed that at one time, the house “was used as a tollhouse, where passengers ate, change horses and paid toll,” she wrote in her 1938 cookbook, Toll House: Tried and True Recipes. That was “marketing fiction,” according to historian John Galluzzo, but “nobody ever really worried about the imaginative date and name,” knowing it was “just good promotional technique.” So was the claim that the house was built in 1709; it was actually completed in 1817. Nevertheless, the owner had the 1709 date painted on the chimney. Today a sign illustrating a colonial man with that date appears on the site of the former restaurant.
The first months after opening the Toll House were difficult, but its reputation for fine food spread; by Christmas, Wakefield and her husband added more tables to the original seven and hired a dozen employees, according to The Great American Chocolate Chip Cookie Book.
To enhance the Toll House’s historic atmosphere, Wakefield decorated the restaurant in the colonial style and included her grandmother’s New England recipes on her menus. She was also an inventive chef who frequently experimented with new recipes. Once the restaurant became successful, she and her husband traveled abroad, where she learned about other cuisines. “Ruth Wakefield can cook ‘by ear.’ Or by taste, I suppose you’d call it. She can eat a strange dish, and come home and re-create it with every ingredient in proportion,” journalist Ernie Pyle observed.
Lobster dinners were one of the Toll House’s most famous meals, but so were desserts like Indian tapioca pudding, chocolate ice-box cake, and Concord grape delight. Recipes for them and others appeared in the chef’s first cookbook, Toll House: Tried and True Recipes of 1931.
By 1938, Wakefield and her husband were serving 1,000 dinners daily and expanding the restaurant, according to Wyman’s book. One unique feature of that expansion was the circular Garden Room built around a live elm tree.
Since Wakefield believed it was important to prepare “interesting food” instead of the same “dreary dishes week after week,” as she advised readers of her cookbook, she began experimenting with one of her most popular desserts. “We had been serving a thin butterscotch cookie with ice cream. Everybody seemed to love it,” Wakefield told a Boston Herald-American reporter,” but I was trying to give them something different. So I came up with the Toll House cookie.”
Exactly how that happened is uncertain. According to Nestlé’s promotional version, Wakefield took one of their semi-sweet chocolate bars and added the broken up candy to the dough. Expecting the chocolate to melt and produce chocolate cookies, Wakefield was surprised when the bits retained their shape and created a new kind of dessert.
Another version claimed that while the chef was returning from a trip to Egypt, she remembered a lesson about chocolate from a college food chemistry class. Working with her pastry cook, Sue Brides, Wakefield added chocolate into the dough and “came up with a new cookie,” according to The Great American Chocolate Chip Cookie Book. Like its butterscotch predecessor, the new cookie contained equal amounts of white and brown sugar, which made cookie “brown throughout and crispy,” so Wakefield called it the Chocolate Crunch Cookie. Both stories reflect Wakefield ‘s intention to create a new dessert.
Customers began clamoring for the cookie, and the Toll House stepped up production. Nestlé noticed an increase in sales in the area, and approached Wakefield, who gave Nestlé the right to use the recipe and the Toll House name. In exchange the company promised her free chocolate for life.
Nestlé started printing the recipe on the back of their chocolate bar packages. To help customers, Wakefield asked the company to score the bars. Later Nestlé molded the chocolate into small chips. The yellow wrapper with “Nestlé Toll House” on the front and the recipe on the back soon became a familiar grocery item. Over time, some of the original baking ingredients were improved, among them the introduction of pre-sifted flour, making Wakefield adjust her recipe.
Ads began appearing in several newspapers, and after the cookie recipe was reprinted in the Boston Herald-Traveler, Wakefield was heard on the radio program “Famous Foods From Famous Eating Places,” hosted by Marjorie Husted, who was known on the show as Betty Crocker.
The biggest national boost came during World War II when newspaper ads encouraged people to bake and send cookies to soldiers.
By 1983, “Toll House Cookies” was such a common term that a federal judge ruled it no longer qualified as a Nestlé’s trademark. Since then, many chocolate chip companies, recipes, brands, and variations on the original have appeared, but none have the colorful history of Ruth Wakefield’s original creation.
After her death at 73 on January 10, 1977, Wakefield’s obituary in the Boston Herald mentioned the cookies. “I’ll never live them down. They’ve had a very interesting life.”
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Comments
Fun article.
I won’t divulge my youngest daughter’s secret ingredient, but she has improved on the Toll House recipe and knows that her chocolate chip cookies are kind of expected at family gatherings. I wonder if that is one reason my oldest grandson decided when he was only 5 or 6 that he really didn’t like cake and didn’t want it for birthday celebrations.
My daughter will bring a container of her cookies and they are often gone by the end of the family gathering.
I agree that an effort should be made to make more interesting food. I found a recipe book at Goodwill a few years ago for $1 promoting a brand of lemon pepper and it finally got me off my lazy, maybe fearful, tendency to not season enough. Now if I can just find an old cookbook from Ruth Wakefield!
Thank you Bob. Clearly Ruth Graves Wakefield was an ingenious woman and her gift lives on through the generations.
Fantastic feature, Nancy. This is a story that was waiting to be told about the WHOLE Toll House chocolate chip story, and the wonderful woman behind it. Mrs. Wakefield was one very enterprising lady, also open to various experimentations as needed, with one good thing leading to another and then another as it was meant to be.
Who’s to say chocolate chip cookies aren’t God’s favorite cookies too? I haven’t asked, but feel it’s quite likely. I loved every minute of reading this incredible story, with all your links. It would have been even better if Ruth had received more substantial royalties, but it was a different time. Doesn’t make it right, but helps us to understand why.