About Mom’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe…

Once upon a time many years ago, I called long distance to ask my mother, who still lived in our little farmhouse in the Mississippi countryside, if she might tell me the recipe for her magical chocolate chip cookies.

I had long since moved away from my rural childhood home, all the way to a Big City in the North. Cooking a few things from the old country had proven to be a way to keep in touch with my Southern roots, and an earlier trip back home to my grandmother’s house had been a delightful time in learning to make her fried apple pies. There was no recipe and no plan; she’d been making them from scratch all her life and thought it both sad and hilarious that I was writing it down.

No doubt my mom’s cookies had the same sort of provenance. Her kitchen had all sorts of banged-up hand mixers and warped rollers and culinary doodads that that had been handed down over the eons.

Mom — her name was Betty — was a bit flustered when she answered my call, but she didn’t need to look this up.

“I make them just like my mother made them,” she said.

Great, I said, pen and paper at the ready. This was really going to be special. How I would charm dinner guests with these Tucker family originals!

The rest of the conversation went something like this:

Mom: “So you’ve got a cookie sheet and everything like that?”

Me: “Yes, ma’am.”

Mom: “Okay, so the first thing, you’ll want to go to the store and get you a bag of Nestle Toll House chocolate chips.”

Me: (scribbling) “Got it!”

Mom: “And the recipe is right there on the back.”

Me:

Mom: “Hello?”

Me: “I —”

Mom: “That’s just how Mamaw made them. And they’re so good!”

I was crushed. The cookies I cherished, the wonders from Mamaw’s old Southern kitchen, were … a corporate promo? Was nothing sacred?

This, it turns out, was a generation-wide realization – the same scenario was a later a popular skit on a “Friends” episode (“nesssuhlll tollHAUSseee”) – a clip of which now has millions of views on social media platforms.

So of course I read every word of my Library colleague JJ Harbster’s wonderful piece over the Christmas holidays about how the Nestle’s “corporate” recipe was actually the homemade concoction of Ruth Graves Wakefield, who, no kidding, invented the chocolate chip cookie in the late 1930s.

She and her husband ran the popular Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts, a small town south of Boston. Wakefield was experimenting with cookie recipes when she decided to chop up a Nestle semisweet chocolate bar and drop the chunks into the batter. The chunks didn’t spread out during baking, and thus the chocolate “chip.”

She called them the “Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookie” (she baked them to a crispy finish) and they were an instant hit, spreading nationwide via her 1938 cookbook, “Toll House Tried and True Recipes,” mass-market radio shows and newspaper articles. It was so popular that a year later, Nestle asked if they could feature her recipe on the back of their chocolate bars. They even altered the product to come in morsel-sized bits, expressly for cookie use.

And no doubt that’s how my grandmother, aka Mamaw, would have come across a bar or a bag of Nestle’s chocolate in a tiny grocery store in Clarksdale, Mississippi, sometime in the late 1930s. She would have looked on the back of the package and thought, “I’ll try that.” My mother would have been 7 or 8.

Wakefield’s recipe became so popular so quickly — particularly with an effective Nestle ad campaign to send the cookies to soldiers serving overseas in World War II — that the postwar generation grew up with the same cookie, from Massachusetts to Mississippi and beyond. They really were homemade, really did seem to be your mom’s own creation and really were dusted with a dash of childhood magic.

And besides, those cookies really were good.

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