Pilfering the Lunch Pail

     When I was a little kid I loved to raid my Father's lunch box.  Every day he carried it to work as he went off to build something special in our community.  He was a master carpenter and many of his works still stand today as a testimony to his skill.  His lunch would vary from day to day but one constant was the cookies he always had for his dessert.  If I didn't find them first he would enjoy 2 Toll House cookies each day.  They were something I eagerly sought in that old black lunch pail.
     But what's the story behind those chocolate chip cookies and how did they get that name?  Like so many other culinary creations, they came about quite by accident.  The year was 1930 and Ruth Wakefield and her husband, Kenneth, decided to purchase an old 18th Century house in Whitman, Massachusetts with the hope of establishing a business there.  According to Ann Treistman, author of Who Put the {DEVIL} in Deviled Eggs?, the structure "once served as a coaching stop for weary travelers looking to change horses and eat a warm meal."  It was because of that history that the Wakefield's named the place The Toll House Inn.
     Mrs. Wakefield was an accomplished cook and a graduate of the Framingham State Normal School Department of Household Arts and a former dietitian.  The meals and desserts she prepared at the inn were well known throughout the area.  Then one day she was preparing to bake some butter drop cookies flavored with baker's chocolate, but to her dismay discovered that she had run out of that ingredient.  So she substituted bits of a Nestle's chocolate bar and added them into the dough.  But unlike the baker's chocolate, the Nestle's chunks did not melt into the batter while in the oven.  They only softened slightly as the batter baked around them.
     And so the chocolate chip cookie was born. They quickly became known to New Englanders as Toll House Cookies.  (Variants of this account abound.  You can compare stories and get the recipe by clicking on the highlighted phrase above.)

 

     Eventually Mrs. Wakefield sold her Toll House Cookie recipe to the Nestle Company in exchange for a lifetime supply of chocolate chips.  To this very day every bag of Nestle chocolate chips sold in North America has the original recipe (or a variation of it) printed on the back.

     I'm going to leave you with a quote from one of the most famous cookie affectionados of all time:

Sometimes me think, "What is friend?"

And then me think, "Friend is what last chocolate chip cookie is for."