The Chocolate Chip Cookie: An Accident

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The Toll House Cookie, one of the most famous inventions ever, was an accident.

Ruth Wakefield and her husband, Kenneth, owned the Toll House Inn near Whitman, Massachusetts, in the 1930s. Ruth made homemade food for her guests.

One evening in 1937, she was making butter cookies and thought she would make them all chocolate instead. She cut a bar of chocolate into tiny pieces and added them to the cookie dough. She thought that the chocolate would melt completely and she would have chocolate cookies. When the cookies came out of the oven, the chocolate hadn't melted at all! Instead, the "chocolate chips" had kept their form.

The guests loved the cookies, and people began to come to the inn just to eat the famous cookies.

How did Nestle get involved? Well, Ruth Wakefield cut up a bar of Nestle chocolate when she made the Toll House cookies. So Ruth went to Nestle with her recipe for "Chocolate Crunch Cookies." Nestle liked the idea, and they got permission from Ruth to put her recipe on the back of their chocolate bars. In return, she got all the chocolate she wanted to keep on baking those cookies.

Nestle tried to make it easy for people to make these cookies. They even included a small chopper in the package. Finally, in 1939, the Chocolate Morsels that we know today were introduced.

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