Thank you Ruth Graves Wakefield.
There are small things in life that make everything better. One of them is chocolate chip cookies. Now, we are not saying that we might not have had chocolate chip cookies without Ruth Graves Wakefield. But there is no denying that this woman made all our lives easier.
Wakefield had a tourist lodge with her husband in Whitman, Massachusetts. The lodge was called The Toll House Inn, and this is the place where chocolate chip cookies were born. Some of the guests to the lodge included John F. Kennedy, who was Senator of Massachusetts back then.
In 1938, Ruth came up with the idea of a chocolate chip cookie. She has been serving a thin butterscotch nut cookie with ice cream for years. And everyone loved it. But she wanted something different, and she came up with the Toll House cookie. She included the cookie in her cookbook, the Toll House Tried and True Recipes.
With the popularity of the cookie, Nestle’s sales of the semi-sweet chocolate bars spiked. So, Nestle and Ruth made an arrangement. The company bought off her recipe and the rights to sell it. They paid one dollar for it, but promised to give her a lifetime supply of Nestle chocolate. Quite the deal for Nestle, right?
