While doing a Google search for yesterday's cookie recipe one of the results that came up was from Wikipedia. Did you know that there is a small controversy about the origins of the Nestle Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe? I didn't either.
Story #1 Mrs. Wakefield was making chocolate cookies but ran out of regular baker's chocolate, so she substituted it with broken pieces of semi-sweet chocolate, thinking that it would melt and mix into the batter. It clearly did not, and the chocolate chip cookie was born. Wakefield sold the recipe to Nestlé in exchange for a lifetime supply of chocolate chips. Every bag of Nestlé chocolate chips in North America has a variation of her original recipe printed on the back.
Story #2 Mr. Boucher states that Mrs. Wakefield was known for her sugar cookies, which came free with every meal, and were for sale in the Toll House Inn's lobby. One day, while mixing a batch of the sugar cookie dough, the vibrations from a large Hobart electric mixer caused bars of Nestlé's chocolate stored on the shelf above the mixer to fall into the mixing bowl, where it was broken up and incorporated into the dough. Mrs. Wakefield believed the dough was ruined and was about to discard it, when Mr. Boucher stopped her and talked her into saving the batch. His reasoning was out of frugality rather than a prediction of the cookie's future popularity.
I've always liked that these cookies are not heavy and doughy but light like a sugar cookie, so I like the second story for this reason. But the thought of a lifetime supply of chocolate chips as payment for a recipe wins hands down. I wonder how much they had to give her?
See the full Wikipedia article here.
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