Ruth Wakefield and Her Chocolate Crunch Cookie

Did you know that the chocolate chip cookie, that we know and love, did not exist prior to the late 1930s?

There was an abundance of chocolate cookie recipes published in cookbooks prior to the late 1930s that incorporated grated chocolate, cocoa, or melted chocolate into cookie batter, but those recipes did not call for bits, morsels or chunks of chocolate – what we now commonly call chocolate chips. Why? Because chocolate chips were not available on the mass market prior to 1940. And more importantly, Ruth Wakefield did not publish her recipe for the chocolate chip cookie until 1938.

The Library of Congress has a copy of Ruth Wakefield’s 1938 Toll House Tried and True Recipes (New York, M. Barrows & Company). It contains what food historians consider to be the first chocolate chip cookie recipe. The cookie was originally called the “Chocolate Crunch Cookie” and later the “Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookie.” Wakefield’s Toll House cookbooks were extremely popular, with 39 printings and a variety of special editions appearing between 1931 and 1977. The Library has examples of Wakefield’s Toll House cookbook from the late 1930s, the 1940s, and the 1950s, as well as the last printing from 1977. The 1940 edition is available digitally on HathiTrust and you can read the Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookie recipe on pg. 216.

Ruth Graves Wakefield (1903-1977) studied home economics and was a dietician and lecturer. In 1930, she opened the Toll House Inn, with her husband Kenneth, in Whitman, Massachusetts, south of Boston. It is here where the Toll House chocolate chip cookie was born.

There are a couple of origin stories for the chocolate chip cookie that promote the idea that the invention was an accident. One story suggests that Ruth ran out of nuts when she was making a batch of cookies, so she grabbed a bar of Nestle chocolate and chopped it into pea-sized bits to give the cookie a crunch. Another story reports that Ruth ran out of cocoa for her cookie batch and thought that if she used small pieces of chocolate, they would melt and make a chocolate cookie – as any experienced baker knows (and Ruth was, no doubt, an expert) – that a baker melts chocolate when adding it to a batter to make something chocolatey. So which story is true?

Nick O’Malley, a reporter for Mass Live, dug deep into the legends of the cookie and the Wakefield’s Toll House. He shared his findings in his Oct. 31, 2024 article “I Spent Months Researching the Chocolate Chip Cookie. Here’s Everything I Learned.” According to O’Malley, in the 1970s, Ruth dismissed the ‘accidental’ origin stories for the cookie and said she was working on a chocolate crunch cookie while travelling abroad and chopping a Nestle chocolate bar into pieces and adding them to a batter was intentional and not an accident. Basically, she wanted to create a new cookie.

Ruth’s “Chocolate Crunch Cookies” were incredibly popular with guests of the Wakefield’s Toll House Inn, and it did not take long for the recipe to go viral.  The recipe was popularized in newspaper advertisements for her cookbook, as well in food columns featuring Ruth’s recipes from the Toll House Inn. The recipe was also featured on the radio show, “The Betty Crocker Cooking School of the Air.”

As a result of all the publicity, Nestle chocolate bars began flying off store shelves and, in 1939, Nestle asked Ruth if they could feature her recipe on their bars of chocolate. The original “Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookie” recipe instructed bakers to chop up bars of chocolate into pea-sized pieces, which were then added to the cookie batter.  By 1940, however, Nestle introduced bars of chocolate molded into tiny square pieces, making it easier for bakers to incorporate morsels of chocolate into their cookie batters. These chocolate ‘chips’ were soon being used in other sweet creations such as cake, pie, and ice cream and I, for one, cannot imagine a world without them.

Today, bakers have created a vast and delicious array of chocolate chip cookie recipes, incorporating ingredients such as coconut, oatmeal, peanut butter, espresso, fruit, cream cheese, and pudding mix to delight palettes the world over. So, let’s raise our cookies to Ruth Wakefield and thank her for giving us the chocolate chip cookie!

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