Chocolate Chip Cookie Inventor: Ruth Wakefield (1903-1977)

The famous chocolate chip cookie—originally known as the Toll House chocolate crunch cookie—was invented by Ruth Graves Wakefield (1903–1977), a teacher and dietitian.

Shortly after she and her husband married, they purchased a historic 1817 property in Whitman, Massachusetts. Since the house was situated along the old toll road halfway between New Bedford and Boston, the couple decided to restore the property and open it to the public as the Toll House Inn. Ruth immediately took charge of the kitchen where she came up with one of the greatest culinary inventions in American history: the chocolate chip cookie.

About Ruth Wakefield

Ruth Graves was born in 1903 and grew up in Easton, Massachusetts. She intended to be a teacher and continued her education at Framingham State Normal School of Household Arts. After graduation in 1924, she taught home economics at a high school in Brockton, Massachusetts. She also worked as a hospital dietitian.

Ruth married Kenneth Wakefield (1897-1997), a meatpacking executive, in 1926. While still young marrieds, Kenneth and Ruth agreed that running an inn sounded like a fun way to make a living.  With the historic house in a prime location, they felt the Toll House Inn would do well.

When they first began advertising the inn, they indicated it was built in colonial times and was an actual stop on the toll road. The house was certainly located along the toll road, but it was built in 1817—too late to have been a stop on any colonial roadway. But what advertiser hasn’t taken advantage of what could have been?

The Toll House Inn

Ruth’s formal training in the domestic arts gave her the perfect background for deciding on the inn’s menu. Blending historic colonial dishes with her grandmother’s cherished favorites, she created a dining experience that quickly put the Toll House Inn on the map.

Over time, the inn became very popular. What began as a humble dining room with just seven tables soon swelled to serve sixty tables at nearly every mealtime. Diners particularly enjoyed the desserts. By 1931, patrons were constantly begging for her culinary secrets, prompting the couple to publish their first cookbook, Ruth Wakefield’s Tried and True Recipes.

Invention of the Toll House Cookie

In 1938, Ruth Wakefield along with her cooking assistant Sue Brides, was experimenting with pecan drop cookie dough.  The basic cookie recipe involved half white sugar and half brown sugar, and people loved the mixture of sugars. Ruth knew there could be interesting variations.

Initially she planned to melt baker’s chocolate and add it to the dough, but then she discovered she was out of baker’s chocolate, so she looked around her pantry and found semi-sweet chocolate bars given to her by Andrew Nestlé.

 She chopped the bar into small bits and sprinkled them into the blond dough. When the cookies were baked, she saw that the chips had remained “chip like,” just as she hoped.  She named the cookies Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookies. Diners loved them.

Word Spreads

Word spread about the cookies.  The Toll House Inn featured the cookie recipe in some of their ads, and in the late 1930s, when a new edition of the cookbook was published, the recipe was included.

The cookies became well enough known that more publicity resulted. Betty Crocker (a fictional figure created by General Mills) had a widely-listened-to radio program that was managed by a woman named Marjorie Husted.  On “The Betty Crocker Cooking School of the Air,” Husted featured the cookies and their fame grew.

As Nestlé’s sales went up, the company began coming up with product changes to encourage more sales. The first effort was to pre-score the bars to make it easier for home cooks to use the ingredient, but by 1940, Nestle began selling bags of actual chocolate chips.

Toll House and Nestle

Stories differ as to whether Wakefield approached Nestlé or whether they approached her, but one way or another, Wakefield and Nestlé entered a partnership. Nestlé gained permission to print Wakefield’s recipe on the back of their packaging. In return, it was said that Wakefield agreed to a consulting deal to work with Nestle on other recipes, and she reportedly received a $1 payment for rights to the recipe in addition to all the chocolate she would need for a lifetime of baking.  (Perhaps more money changed hands later.)

Wakefield’s Toll House cookbooks were carried at bookstores across the country. There were 39 printings of her first book (frequently updated). In addition, there were a variety of special editions between 1931 and 1977.

Toll House Cookies and World War II

Sue Brides’s daughter remembers that in the 1940s, the interest in the cookies skyrocketed. As Massachusetts soldiers received cookie care packages from home, the Toll House Inn began receiving letters from all over the country.

Peg Brides worked in the kitchen with her mom, helping to pack boxes of cookies for overseas. (To read about the difficulty of sending packages overseas during World War II, read about the 6888 Central Postal Battalion.)

Cookie Lives On

The original Toll House Inn burned down in 1984. (There is now a marker noting its location.) But the cookie lives on. What began as a calculated experiment in a Massachusetts kitchen has blossomed into a global phenomenon, with Americans alone consuming billions of chocolate chip cookies every single year.

Click here for the Nestle Toll House cookie recipe. (According to Peg Brides, the original recipe used Crisco.)

For another story about a woman who made a huge difference in our cooking lives, click here for the story of Fannie Farmer. Farmer instituted the process of precise measurements.

 

Share with Others!