2018 the year of the Chocolate Chip Cookie

In 2018 you may hear an awful lot about cookies. Why is that? Well it’s all about a lady who had the name of Ruth Graves Wakefield. In her time Ruth Graves Wakefield was a household name, but now she has slipped from the public consciousness, which is a shame because she is the lady who is created with creating the cookie, or more precisely the Toll House Cookie, the first chocolate chip cookie.

2018 is the 80^th anniversary of this wonderful creation but, so history tells us, the story could have been very different indeed. Ruth Graves Wakefield was an American chef during the Great Depression era and first started working as a dietitian before starting a new business called the Toll House located roughly halfway between Boston and New Bedford. The place was named after the fact that passengers had historically paid a toll to use it. As Ruth knew about food she became the chef and soon generated great interest in her recipes especially her lobster dinners and desserts.

In 1938 she was experimenting with making a more exciting and different biscuit to serve her guests when she broke up pieces of a Nestle semi sweet chocolate bar in a cookie. As Ruth later told reporters, “We had been serving a thin butterscotch nut cookie with ice cream. Everybody seemed to love it, but I was trying to give them something different. So I came up with Toll House cookie.”

During World War Two her fame crossed the North Atlantic when soldiers received care packages from back in the States that included the cookies.  Such was the appeal of the sweet treats that soldiers regularly wrote home asking for more to be sent to Europe and other battlefronts. It wasn’t long before chocolate chip cookies had become something of a national craze.