In 1938, Ruth Wakefield introduced the world to a cookie that would eventually become an American staple.
Wakefield and her husband Kenneth owned the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts, where she developed recipes for the restaurant’s guests. Among them was a new creation she called the “Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookie,” made by incorporating pieces of Nestlé semi-sweet chocolate into cookie dough.
The recipe appeared in the 1938 edition of Wakefield’s cookbook “Toll House Tried and True Recipes” and it didn’t take long for the unusual cookie to catch on.
In fact, its popularity proved particularly good for Nestlé.
As home bakers began recreating Wakefield’s cookies, sales of the company’s semi-sweet chocolate bars reportedly surged. In 1939, Nestlé reached an agreement with Wakefield allowing the company to print her Toll House cookie recipe on its chocolate packaging.
The price of that enormously consequential deal? Just $1, along with a lifetime supply of chocolate for Wakefield. She also became a consultant for the company.
At the time, however, there were no bags of chocolate chips waiting in the baking aisle. Wakefield’s original recipe instructed bakers to cut a semi-sweet chocolate bar into small pieces.
Nestlé soon made the process considerably easier. The company first altered its chocolate bars to make them easier to break into pieces and then introduced ready-made semi-sweet chocolate morsels. The product became so closely associated with Wakefield’s recipe that the Toll House name remains on Nestlé’s chocolate chips and baking products today.
There’s also a persistent legend that one of America’s most famous cookies was invented entirely by accident, with Wakefield expecting pieces of chocolate to melt into the dough as the cookies baked.
But Wakefield herself offered a different story.
According to an account preserved by Bridgewater State University, Wakefield said she had been serving a thin butterscotch nut cookie with ice cream at the Toll House Inn but wanted to offer guests something different. The chocolate-studded cookie was the result.
Its popularity only grew. During World War II, Massachusetts servicemen received Toll House cookies in care packages and shared them with soldiers from elsewhere in the country, helping spread the cookie far beyond New England.
Wakefield and her husband eventually sold the Toll House Inn in 1966. By then, the cookie she created there had long since escaped the walls of the Massachusetts restaurant.
And the recipe Wakefield reportedly licensed for a dollar became so enduring that, decades later, countless bags of chocolate chips still carry the name of the inn where it began.