Ruth Graves Wakefield
Source of Recipe
recipecircus/ ann ring
List of Ingredients
It may be hard to believe, but before the 1930s no one had ever had the pleasure of biting into a chocolate chip cookie. Why? The sweet world-famous treat had not been invented yet.
Ruth Graves Wakefield was the woman responsible for coming up with the concoction. Ruth graduated from the Framingham State Normal School Department of Household Arts in 1924. After graduation, she worked as a dietitian and food lecturer. In 1930, Ruth and her husband Kenneth Wakefield purchased a Cape Cod-style toll house located halfway between Boston and New Bedford, on the outskirts of Whitman, Massachusetts. The house had originally been built in 1709, and at that time it had served as a haven for road-weary travelers. There, passengers paid tolls, changed horses and ate home-cooked meals.
More than 200 years later, the Wakefields decided to build on the house's tradition, turning into a lodge and calling it the Toll House Inn. Ruth cooked home-made meals and baked for guests of the inn, and as she improved upon traditional Colonial recipes, her incredible desserts began attracting people from all over New England.
One of Ruth's favorite recipes was for Butter Drop Do cookies. As she prepared the batter one day she discovered she had run out of baker's chocolate. She found a semi-sweet chocolate bar that had been given to her by Andrew Nestle, and so she cut it into tiny bits and added them to the dough, expecting them to melt as the cookies baked in the oven. However, the chocolate did not melt. Instead, it held its shape and softened to a delicately creamy texture. Needless to say, the cookies Ruth had created became very popular with guests at the inn, and soon her recipe was published in a Boston newspaper, as well as other papers in the New England area.
Meanwhile, Nestle saw sales of its Semi-Sweet Chocolate Bar jump dramatically, and Ruth and Nestle came together to reach an agreement that would allow Nestle to print the "Toll House Cookie" recipe on its packaging. Part of this agreement included supplying Ruth with all of the chocolate she could use for the rest of her life.
Nestle, meanwhile, began scoring the Semi-Sweet Chocolate Bar, and packaged it with a special chopper for easily cutting it into small morsels. Then, in 1939, Nestle had a better idea, and began offering Nestlé Toll House Real Semi-Sweet Chocolate Morsels. The rest is "chocolate-chip" history. Ruth continued to cook up a storm, producing a series of cookbooks including "Ruth Wakefield's Recipes: Tried and True," which went through thirty-nine printings. She and Kenneth sold the Toll House Inn in 1966 to a family that tried to turn it into a nightclub. In 1970 it was bought by the Saccone family who turned it back into it's original form. The Toll House burned down, however, on New Years Eve in 1984.
Ruth Graves Wakefield passed away in 1977.
Recipe
FACT...CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE
The original chocolate chip cookie, the Toll House Cookie, was invented by Ruth Graves Wakefield in the 1930s. Ruth and her husband Kenneth owned the Toll House Inn, near Whitman, Massachusetts. Ruth cooked for her guests, and one day had to substitute semi-sweet chocolate for baker's chocolate in a cookie recipe. She chopped the chocolate in bits, but when she took the cookies from the oven, the semi-sweet chocolate had not melted into the dough as the baker's chocolate had. These cookies with chocolate 'chips' became an immediate hit with her guests.
The official state cookie of Massachusetts is the chocolate chip cookie, invented in 1930 at the Toll House Restaurant.
On February 7, 2001, the Chocolate Chip Cookie was declared the official cookie of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
TRIVIA...CHOCOLATE
Aztec emperor Montezuma drank 50 golden goblets of hot chocolate every day. It was thick, dyed red and flavored with chili peppers.
(Now that’s Hot Chocolate!)
Columbus brought cacao (chocolate) beans back to Spain on his fourth voyage in 1502.
Hershey's Chocolate was introduced in 1900.
Cole Porter got a kick from fudge. He had nine pounds of it shipped to him each month from his hometown.
The fruit of the Cacao tree grow directly from the trunk. They look like small melons, and the pulp inside contains 20 to 50 seeds or beans. It takes about 400 beans to make a pound of chocolate.
Never give a dog chocolate, as it contains theobromine, which is a central nervous system stimulant. As little as 2 ounces can be lethal to a small dog.
Bittersweet chocolate is what is usually called for in baking.
It contains more chocolate liquor (at least 35%) and less sugar than sweet chocolate.
Semisweet chocolate contains 15% - 35% chocolate liquor.
One ounce of chocolate contains about 20 mg of caffeine.
Americans consumed over 3.1 billion pounds of chocolate in 2001, which is almost half of the total world's production.
Chocolate syrup was used for the blood in the famous shower scene in the Alfred Hitchcock movie 'Psycho'. The scene lasts for about 45 seconds in the movie, but took 7 days to film.
Seven billion pounds of chocolate and candy are manufactured each year in the United States.
Hawaii is the only state that grows cacao beans to produce chocolate.
In the U.S. chocolate candy outsells all other types of candy combined, by 2 to 1.
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