The Secret History of the Toll House Cookie

December 5, 2014 11:32 AM

The entire creation story of the Toll House Cookie™ is full of half-truths and outright misinformation. It’s time we knew the truth about the history of chocolate chip cookies. (sl, the Toast.)

Years later, in an interview on the cookie’s anniversary, Mrs. Wakefield told a reporter that she was thinking about a new cookie to serve and came up with an idea she wanted to try involving her Butterscotch Nut Wafers and bits of chocolate, and that’s where the idea for the cookies came from. Even though she said this, most stories persist in ignoring the truth and using the fabrications. The truth is, Ruth Wakefield made experimental cookies until she got what she had in mind. It was a deliberate attempt on her part to make a new cookie.

posted by pie ninja (44 comments total)

Not that I don't like chocolate now and then, but if someone sold chocolate chip cookies without the chocolate chips, I would buy those cookies.
posted by rocket88 at 11:47 AM on December 5, 2014 [5 favorites]

Dammit, now I want chocolate chip cookies. Someone bake me some cookies.
posted by Kitteh at 11:51 AM on December 5, 2014 [4 favorites]

...but if someone sold chocolate chip cookies without the chocolate chips, I would buy those cookies.

That's really the true genius of toll house/choc.chip cookies, isn't it? The dough itself is sublime goodness. Butter, eggs, brown sugar. It's like the holy trinity of baking.

I, too, could eagerly eat it w/o chips. I elect not to, of course, but I could.
posted by Thorzdad at 11:56 AM on December 5, 2014 [2 favorites]

Came expecting eldritch horrors and hauntings as a creation myth; incredibly pleased to discover a fascinating article and new favorite Navy-approved shorthand.
posted by jetlagaddict at 12:00 PM on December 5, 2014 [2 favorites]

I'm sort of dubious about any foodstuff's origin story--the Toll House cookies, potato chips, Silly Putty (don't judge)--so I'm not particularly surprised, here.

I made the Food Lab chocolate chip cookies a few weeks ago. They were a pain in the tuchus, with the brown buttering and the overnighting, and honestly, I found that the unbaked dough was transcendent (really; I would have eaten the entire batch), but the finished product was pretty much like any other very good chocolate chip cookie.

As an aside: Costco's Kirkland chocolate chips are great. I eat them by the handful every day. I don't know what brand they really are, but if you have a Costco membership you should probably buy some.
posted by uncleozzy at 12:00 PM on December 5, 2014

also I would like to award a medal of Most Valiant Honor or something to the scientist who sorted out the alchemy behind cookie dough ice cream; a service to the world was performed that day, and I shall raise a spoon to them
posted by jetlagaddict at 12:01 PM on December 5, 2014 [3 favorites]

Original Toll House Cookies™ were small and crunchy; the new, improved 1979 versions are larger, thicker, and chewier.

This is one of those cases where the "new, improved" versions actually are. Except for, you know, the fact that they're like sticks of butter with chocolate added. Which is why they're so delicious.
posted by graymouser at 12:07 PM on December 5, 2014

This is one of those cases where the "new, improved" versions actually are. Except for, you know, the fact that they're like sticks of butter with chocolate added. Which is why they're so delicious.

Except for, you know, the fact that they're like sticks of butter with chocolate added.

sticks of butter with chocolate added.

Guys uh

Guys I'll be right back I just had an idea

brb
posted by Tomorrowful at 12:16 PM on December 5, 2014 [35 favorites]

Tomorrowful: "Guys uh

Guys I'll be right back I just had an idea

brb"

I'll call 911 if you aren't back in a couple hours.
posted by ArgentCorvid at 12:29 PM on December 5, 2014 [3 favorites]

but if someone sold chocolate chip cookies without the chocolate chips, I would buy those cookies.

this is my husband's favorite cookie - use the tollhouse recipe, leave out the chocolate, double or triple the vanilla, get the dough nice and cold but not hard, stir in a splash of milk, and bake as normal. they're amazing.
posted by nadawi at 12:34 PM on December 5, 2014 [19 favorites]

I don't know if we're actually related (we share a last name, and I definitely had relatives in Massachusetts around the 30's), but from here on out the story is that my great-grandma Ruth invented the chocolate chip cookie. Pretty sure I am going to be much more popular that I was before.
posted by Jawn at 12:36 PM on December 5, 2014 [3 favorites]

the final step is so unnecessary though.
posted by poffin boffin at 12:36 PM on December 5, 2014 [2 favorites]

the dough without the chips is strangely not as delicious. i usually do half a batch with chips and half without and eat the dough that has the chocolate.
posted by nadawi at 12:39 PM on December 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

The entire creation story of the Toll House Cookie™ is full of half-truths and outright misinformation. It’s time we knew the truth about the history of chocolate chip cookies.

And yet people still say that hard-hitting investigative journalism is dead.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 12:48 PM on December 5, 2014 [5 favorites]

Chocolate chip cookies without the chocolates tastes off. The cookies need those little pips of chocolate for the flavor and because the chocolate adds a variation in the creaminess a good, rich cookie has. The cookie should also have chunks of walnut -- without them the texture seems monotonous, but with walnuts in proper proportion a chocolate chip cookie is like a jazz trio locked in a perfect groove, doing a thing they do best while riffing infinite variations on the theme.

But eating raw chocolate chip cookie dough, man. What the hell is wrong with you? Put that stuff in an oven before you put it in your mouth.
posted by ardgedee at 2:03 PM on December 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

RAW COOKIE DOUGH IS THE ONLY REASON TO MAKE COOKIE DOUGH, ARDGEDEE, AND YOU KNOW IT! *pistols at dawn*
posted by bitter-girl.com at 2:05 PM on December 5, 2014 [10 favorites]

There are only two good reasons for actually baking chocolate chip cookie dough:

1) Milk-dunking (if you go for the crunchy cookie)
2) Portion control. Cookies come in individual portions, so even if you eat ten of them, at least you know you've eaten ten. Cookie dough, on the other hand, comes in one portion size: all of it.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 2:10 PM on December 5, 2014 [14 favorites]

I'll bet most Origin Stories are false.
posted by discopolo at 2:20 PM on December 5, 2014

I always assumed that Toll House was some Johnny-come-lately trying to pull the wool over our eyes by renaming the chocolate chip cookie and turning into their own proprietary recipe. I had no idea that chocolate chip cookies were a fairly recent cultural invention, and that the Toll House cookie was the ur-chocolate chip cookie. I feel like apologizing to them or something.
posted by redsparkler at 2:21 PM on December 5, 2014 [5 favorites]

I am shocked, SHOCKED that someone on the internet disagrees on how to eat my favorite food, which I am obviously right about.
posted by rikschell at 2:21 PM on December 5, 2014 [3 favorites]

I've come to view all those bits of fluffy history provided by corporations as automatically suspect. My dawning realization came when I came to see that that text in the Monopoly box detailing the history of the game was mostly propaganda mythmaking. Then the news of The Landlord's Game broke out and I realized, holy crap I was right.
posted by JHarris at 2:35 PM on December 5, 2014 [3 favorites]

but if someone sold chocolate chip cookies without the chocolate chips, I would buy those cookies.
posted by rocket88

I have a good friend who makes the best chocolate chip cookies, but I also prefer the cookie without the chips, so he usually makes me a few without chips when he bakes a batch.

blurker-spouse has dubbed these Toll Free Cookies.
posted by blurker at 2:58 PM on December 5, 2014 [12 favorites]

the dough without the chips is strangely not as delicious. i usually do half a batch with chips and half without and eat the dough that has the chocolate.
posted by nadawi

And I, as an eater of the Toll Free kind when baked, agree completely with you about the raw dough. Weird!
posted by blurker at 3:05 PM on December 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

While not as good as real cookie dough, some of y'all might be interested in this recipe for eggless (and thus safe to eat raw) cookie dough. I was making some in order to make ice cream gyoza for a dumpling-themed party and sort of reflexively put a bunch of chocolate chips in, so I made another batch for the faux-gyoza and came to the party with a bonus bowl full of safe raw chocolate chip cookie dough batter and it was a bit hit.
posted by rmd1023 at 3:31 PM on December 5, 2014 [4 favorites]

I feel you, JHarris. I was always suspicious of the story on the back of the bag. There's no way something so perfect was an accident.
posted by ob1quixote at 4:11 PM on December 5, 2014

This won't be a particularly practical tip for those who smoke marijuana, but if you make toll house cookie dough and leave it in the fridge for two or three days before baking, the resulting cookies will be insanely delicious.
posted by haricotvert at 4:15 PM on December 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

rmd: could do something similar with thin, baked cookie dough for a chips-n-salsa effect
posted by rhizome at 5:02 PM on December 5, 2014

We call the chip-less cookies "cookie-flavored cookies" and they are just heaven all by themselves.
posted by lilac girl at 5:48 PM on December 5, 2014

Original Toll House Cookies™ were small and crunchy; the new, improved 1979 versions are larger, thicker, and chewier.

Not really. Oddly, when I make them, they always end up fairly flat (with the chips making chocolatey boils across the top) but still chewy with a slightly crisp exoskeleton. I like them a whole lot more than the current fashion of fat, under-baked, hubcap-sized gut bombs. A cookie is a perfect little treat, not a family-style meal.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:58 PM on December 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

sez you
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 7:10 PM on December 5, 2014 [2 favorites]

Whenever I needed a day off I would buy my manager a tube of the premade cookie dough and a spoon.

Always got my days off. Never saw her take the tube home.
posted by M Edward at 7:49 PM on December 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

One of the possessions I am most disproprtionately proud of is this. About seven, eight years ago when I lived in southern Maine I would often go to the dump of a Saturday, because they had the Freebie Barn where you could bring your old stuff and put it on the shelves, and take whatever stuff other people had left on the shelves. I saw a nice old cookbook - I love old cookbooks - titled "Ruth Wakefield's Tried and True Recipes." I knew she was the Toll House inventor, so I grabbed it and took it home. And when I got home I found it was signed by her! I still have it. A very good find IMO. It's much like the one on the post image but the typography's laid out a little differently and it doesn't say "Toll House."

The article's point is pot on. I've been writing about this era in food history recently. Domestic science/home economics, as silly as some of it seems to us now, was serious science at the time and women like Wakefield had strategies, methods and education. Not an accident, but it is interesting that the marketing minds of the time decided a woman's invention would play better if it were a discovery rather than the result of education and experimental methods. Interesting.
posted by Miko at 9:25 PM on December 5, 2014 [9 favorites]

Oh yeah and I like crispy small crusty ones too. MY grandmother knew the (old) Toll House recipe by heart and we'd make them when she babysat us. That's the cookie I grew up on. I don't really like them when they're soft and doughy.

But the best is when they've set and they're crunchy and yet the chips are still in that half-melted, half-solid state...OMG.
posted by Miko at 9:27 PM on December 5, 2014 [2 favorites]

Agh, I'm seeing ™s everywhere.
posted by Spatch at 3:47 AM on December 6, 2014

> But the best is when they've set and they're crunchy and yet the chips are still in that half-melted, half-solid state...OMG.

YES.

This is what you-all cookie dough eaters are missing. It's because you're so used to the modern cookie recipe -- for which the end product is more like pan-seared cookie dough than a properly baked cookie -- that you aren't grokking what you miss by stopping at the dough part.
posted by ardgedee at 5:11 AM on December 6, 2014

You eat the dough left over while the cookies bake, then eat the cookies when they cool. It's an orgiastic celebration of gluttony!
posted by winna at 6:03 AM on December 6, 2014 [2 favorites]

The entire creation story of the Toll House Cookie™ is full of half-truths and outright misinformation. It’s time we knew the truth about the history of chocolate chip cookies.

"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend"
posted by TDavis at 7:40 AM on December 6, 2014

Not to divert from the delicious cookie- and dough-eating focus TOO much, but I'm finding her whole point about the 'butter drop do' vs. 'butter drop, ditto,' questionable. The facsimile text she points to does have a '.' after 'do.' But, where she insists this makes 'do' an abbreviation, there's also a period after all the other (obviously non-abbreviated) recipe titles. I still think 'do' could mean ditto, since the other recipe names seem to be more factual than cutesy. And I buy that the butterscotch nut cookies may be a more direct predecessor to the chocolate chip ones. But it bugs me that, in an article debunking the recipe's origin story, she insists on the '.' making 'do' an abbreviation when a glance at the preceding and following recipe titles is all it takes to undermine that argument.
posted by daisyace at 7:48 AM on December 6, 2014 [1 favorite]

I was once thrown out of homemaking class for eating the cookie dough and forbidden to keep my own baked cookies because "You might give them to other students and give them your germs."

Not defending my teenager lack of hygiene; pretty sure I double-dipped the spoon into the batter. That's gross, but I seriously doubt my mouth germs would have survived the baking process. And I probably wouldn't have shared the cookies anyway.
posted by emjaybee at 8:55 AM on December 6, 2014

For me, crunchy vs chewy depends entirely on how much ice cold milk is at my disposal. If there is enough around for dunkage, then it's crunchy cookies all the way (President's Choice The Decadent, ideally--my general gluttony usually precludes me from baking at home). If I'm not in a milk mood or don't have any, fatass chewy cookies pls.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:45 AM on December 6, 2014

"do." almost always means ditto in documents of that era. The "do" didn't even always need to have a period following - it was sometimes written as a subscript kind of notation or even a superscript, so it would not require a period in order to be an abbreviation. It was clear to everyone at the time what "do" meant. If you search "do." in the Amelia Simmons text, you'll see it used in a lot of places to mean "ditto" or "the same as above." In this instance, where the text reads:

Gingerbread Cakes, or butter and sugar Gingerbread.

No. 1. Three pounds of flour, a grated nutmeg, two ounces ginger, one pound sugar, three small spoons pearl ash dissolved in cream, one pound butter, four eggs, knead it stiff, shape it to your fancy, bake 15 minutes.

Soft Gingerbread to be baked in pans.

No. 2. Rub three pounds of sugar, two pounds of butter, into four pounds of flour, add 20 eggs, 4 ounces ginger, 4 spoons rose water, bake as No. 1.

Butter drop do.

No. 3. Rub one quarter of a pound butter, one pound sugar, sprinkled with mace, into one pound and a quarter flour, add four eggs, one glass rose water, bake as No. 1.

I would take Simmons' "do." to mean "to be baked in pans," as in the recipe above. I don't agree that it is another way of saying "another" because Simmons has a way of saying "another," I think the "ditto" refers to the baking procedure mentioned just above. Having read a lot of these recipes and worked with colonial cookbooks often, I stand by that read.

And The Toast's theory about wanting to connect Wakefield's recipe with Simmons' with no real reason to do so is spot on for the time. It was high Colonial Revival, the same period of time in which Colonial Williamsburg and a slew of other early American house museums were founded and Windsor chairs and eagle stencils were high style. There was a lot of anxiety over immigration and modernization and anything "colonial" had cachet with the dominant class and a very appealing air authenticity. Being able to make some kind of connection there would have pleased marketers of the time. At the same time, you don't need to cast back to Simmons to find a cookie recipe - Anglo Colonial people in the US (like Simmons) really weren't making cookies as we know them. The recipes are for breads and cookies that (with all that pearlash in them) were light and soft like little cakes. The "Butter Drop" in Simmons' book is included with other breads and cakes (not the "cookies" above) and is very much like a pound cake recipe with a lot less butter, so a harder stiffer result, and if "to be baked in pans" the idea would be to slice and serve it in wedges or bars. The genealogy of Wakefield's cookie is more the inheritance from Dutch & German cookie traditions, passed through the rationalizing sieve of late nineteenth-century domestic science kitchens.
posted by Miko at 1:18 PM on December 6, 2014 [4 favorites]

Here's an example from the 1840s where "do" is both in superscript with a period, and with no period. Here's an image where it's just superscript, no period. These things weren't standardized.
posted by Miko at 1:29 PM on December 6, 2014 [2 favorites]

rmd1023 While not as good as real cookie dough, some of y'all might be interested in this recipe for eggless (and thus safe to eat raw) cookie dough.

The problem with most raw dough products isn't just the eggs but the flour. The eggs are pasteurized but the flour is untreated and can harbor nasties like E. coli. One of our clients spent millions on packaging updates just to include the statement, "DO NOT EAT RAW XXX" on any product with flour. It goes on everything from a box of brownie mix to labels than go on 1000kg industrial flour totes.
posted by nathan_teske at 10:28 AM on December 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

Huh! I didn't realize that. YAY NEW THINGS THAT I CAN WORRY ABOUT KILLING ME!
posted by rmd1023 at 10:31 AM on December 7, 2014 [1 favorite]