When I was a freshman at  Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, one of the great treats was to be taken out to dinner (usually by one's parents) at The Toll House in Whitman, not far from Boston.  There were four things that made The Toll House an unforgettable restaurant:  their succulent lobster dishes, the memory feat that -- no matter how large the party -- the waitresses never wrote down the orders, the huge tree breaking through the roof of the middle of the main dining room, and the fact that this was The Toll House, the one where Chocolate Chip Cookies originated.

It actually was the site of a real toll house built in 1709, where stage coach passengers ate a meal while horses were changed and a toll was taken for use of the highway between Boston and New Bedford, a prosperous whaling town.

It was at The Toll House that I bought my first cookbook, and it was of course, "The Toll House Cookbook," signed by the author and proprietor of the restaurant, Ruth Graves Wakefield.   She and her husband Kenneth had bought the house in 1930, in the midst of the Depression, and with their life savings started a restaurant with seven tables accommodating not more than thirty-five diners.  Ruth had been trained as a home economics teacher, and Ken was in the food business.

Good food, made with only the best ingredients, became their stand-by, and customers began asking for the recipes.  One of the most popular recipes was the one for Chocolate Crunch Cookies, which Ruth invented in 1937 when she cut up a bar of Nestle's semi-sweet chocolate, thinking the pieces of chocolate would melt into the dough.   The chips of chocolate remained intact, however, and a new cookie was born.  The Nestle Company recognized a good thing, made chocolate chips in addition to chocolate bars, and printed The Toll House recipe on the package.

The Toll House is no more.  The Wakefields sold it in 1966, and it burned down on New Year's Eve in 1984.  However, the ubiquitous "Chocolate Chip Cookie" goes on.  Right now there are at least 6,739 internet sites which mention the chocolate chip cookie. It is said that half the cookies in America contain chocolate chips and that amounts to seven billion cookies a year.

If you'd like Ruth Graves Wakefield's recipe, here it is, from the cookbook I bought in the restaurant's gift shop:

TOLL HOUSE CHOCOLATE CRUNCH COOKIES

Cream
1 cup butter.
Add
3/4 cup brown sugar  [note: that means "packed"]
3/4 cup white sugar
2 eggs, beaten
 Dissolve
1 teaspoon soda in  [note: that means baking soda]
1 teaspoon hot water

 Add alternately with
2 1/4 cups flour sifted with
1 teaspoon salt
 Add
1 cup chopped nuts
2 packages semisweet chocolate morsels [note: today's equivalent is
     ONE 12 oz. (340g) package of Nestle's semi-sweet morsels]
1 teaspoon vanilla

Drop by half teaspoonfuls onto greased cookie sheet.  Bake at 375 degrees F for 10 to 12 minutes.  Makes 100 cookies.

 Ruth Wakefield adds this note:
 "At Toll House we chill this dough overnight.  When ready for baking, we roll a teaspoon of dough between palms of hands and place balls two inches apart on greased baking sheet.  Then we press balls with finger tips to form flat rounds.  This way cookies do not spread as much in the baking and they keep uniformly round.  They should be brown through, and crispy, not white and hard as I have sometimes seen them."

The next time you bite into a Chocolate Chip Cookie, remember that, before Mrs. Fields, before Famous Amos, before the Neiman Marcus hoax, there was The Toll House.

And if you want a cookie to eat -- right now! -- without baking them yourself, you might want to try one of these from Matt's Cookies, whose web site provided the disappearing cookie.

 Who Cooked That Up? is copyrighted 1997 by J.J. Schnebel,
revised February 2002
all rights reserved for your pleasure and enlightenment

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