27/12/2025
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In celebration of the sweet treats of the holiday season, we're honoring Ruth Graves Wakefield who was a business owner, author, and chef -- and the inventor of the chocolate chip cookie! Today, versions of the cookie she invented are available nearly everywhere, and it all started with a bit of ingenuity and a desire to add a new treat to her restaurant's menu.
Unusually for a woman of her day, Wakefield was a university graduate: she was educated in household arts at the Framingham State Normal School and toured as a dietitian, teaching people about food and nutrition. In 1930, she and her husband bought the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts. Wakefield cooked and served all the meals, and quickly became famous for her food, particularly her desserts. Popular legend says her cookie invention was the result of a happy accident, but Wakefield maintained that she was actively working on creating a new treat. “We had been serving a thin butterscotch nut cookie with ice cream,” she said. “Everybody seemed to love it, but I was trying to give them something different." So Wakefield took a kitchen knife to a block of chocolate, added it to her cookie dough, and the chocolate chip cookie was born.
The cookie rapidly became a hit with her guests and when Wakefield reissued her best-selling cookbook, “Toll House Tried and True Recipes,” in 1938, she included “The Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookie.” The recipe made the book even more popular, and soon the Nestlé chocolate company found demand for its semi-sweet bars of chocolate spiking. Andrew Nestlé approached Wakefield about the rights for the recipe, and soon Nestlé was making semi-sweet chips specifically for cookies -- and printing the Toll House cookie recipe on every package. What did Wakefield ask for the rights to the recipe and the Toll House name? One dollar... plus a lifetime supply of Nestlé chocolate!
Wakefield died in 1977, but her legacy lives on: her cookbook is still in print today and her recipe is still printed on each package of Nestlé Toll House Morsels. And, of course, it’s a rare person who hasn’t sampled some variation of her chocolate crunch cookie. After all, as the vintage ads said, “They never get enough of my Toll House cookies!”
Ruth Graves Wakefield's original cookbook "Toll House Tried and True Recipes" is available at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780486235608 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/3mwK3SS (Amazon)
Her story is told in the delightful picture book "How the Cookie Crumbled: The True (and Not-So-True) Stories of the Invention of the Chocolate Chip Cookie" for ages 5 to 9 at https://www.amightygirl.com/how-the-cookie-crumbled
She is also one of many female inventors featured in “Girls Think of Everything: Stories of Ingenious Inventions By Women” for age 8 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/girls-think-of-everything
To introduce kids to another culinary pioneer, Julia Child, we highly recommend "Who Was Julia Child?" for ages 8 to 12 at https://www.amightygirl.com/who-was-julia-child
For more Mighty Girl books that celebrate the joy that comes from cooking, visit our "Food & Cooking" book section at https://amgrl.co/2GvCg3d
