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The Chocolate Chip Cookie

Michael Pohuski/Foodpix/JupiterImages

The Chocolate Chip Cookie

1933

How investors got through the market crash of 1929 without chocolate chip cookies is anyone’s guess. In 1933, Ruth Wakefield, who ran the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Mass., invented one of our most loved comfort foods. Her “butter drop do” cookie recipe, dating from Colonial times, called for baker’s chocolate, which Wakefield didn’t have on hand. She chopped up a chocolate bar instead, thinking it would melt into the cookie. (A more whimsical version of the story has a chocolate bar rattling off a shelf into Ruth’s mixing bowl.) Nestlé was so impressed with the cookie’s success that it made a deal with Ruth: a lifetime of chocolate in return for permission to print the recipe. She accepted, and the instructions for Toll House Cookies can still be found on packages of Nestlé chocolate chips.