I was trying to give them something different
Ruth Wakefield, the Toll House Inn and the invention of a cookie
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Ruth Wakefield invented the chocolate chip cookie. And just consider this — when she pulled that first batch out of the oven at the Toll House Inn, chocolate chips themselves hadn’t even been invented yet.
Ruth grew up in Plymouth County, Massachusetts. She always loved baking and cooking, and later, she taught home economics at a local high school and worked as a hospital dietician. In 1930, she and her husband Kenneth renovated a historic building in the town of Whitman, turning it into a popular vacation spot: the Toll House Inn.
Ruth and her husband got savvy about marketing their hotel and its restaurant. The building had never been a toll house, but they didn’t contradict guests who assumed the name revealed some historic heritage. Numbers on the chimney declared “1709,” leading visitors to assume the building dated back to colonial New England — but the inn was just a little over 100 years old when Ruth and Kenneth bought the place. The “1709” was marketing, pure and simple.
Within a few years of running it, though, the Wakefields’ hospitality project exploded in popularity. Celebrities like Bette Davis, Gloria Swanson and Cole Porter loved grabbing a table on their way to Cape Cod, and even politicians like Eleanor Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, Jr. dined on such Toll House classics as the poached lobster and “seafoam salad ring” (lime gelatin being the main “salad” ingredient, of course).
Ruth’s dessert case made the Toll House Inn famous. She whipped up special recipes for lemon meringue pie, “Indian pudding” and baba au rhum. People especially loved her housemade ice cream, which the Inn served with a pecan cookie tucked into the curve of a scoop.
“Everybody seemed to love it,” Ruth later said. “But I was trying to give them something different.”
One night, some time in the late 1930s, Ruth landed on that “something different.” Her original vision for a new cookie involved melting squares of dark, unsweetened chocolate into the butterscotch-flavoured pecan dough of the old Inn standby.
But on the fateful night, Ruth only had a bar of Nestlé semisweet on hand. So, she grabbed an ice pick, hacked the chocolate into bite-sized chunks and sprinkled it throughout her cookie dough (which she then stashed in the icebox before baking in neat circles1). The result — which she first named the “Toll House Inn Chocolate Crunch Cookie” — changed the world.
She published her recipe in 1938, in an updated version of her Toll House Inn cookbook. By 1940, she’d struck a deal with Nestlé so they could print her instructions on the package for their brand-new product: ready-made chocolate chips, which they called “Toll House Morsels.”
Ruth and Kenneth sold the Toll House Inn in 1967, and Ruth passed away just 10 years later. She lived long enough to see companies like Nabisco and Pillsbury release packaged knockoffs, but she died only a few years before she could taste Ben & Jerry’s chocolate chip cookie dough flavor. The Toll House Inn burned down in the 1980s, and but today, you can find chocolate chip cookies sold all over the world.
Everyone agrees: her recipe is still the best.
More on 🍪:
The Great American Chocolate Chip Cookie Book, by Carolyn Wyman
Contrary to What You’ve Heard, Toll House Didn’t Invent the Chocolate Chip Cookie, Eater
The Original, 90-Year-Old Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe Is Still the Best, AllRecipes
Sweet Morsels: A History of the Chocolate-Chip Cookie, The New Yorker
Eight Defining Moments in the History of the Chocolate Chip Cookie, History.com
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