Making dough: how corporate America created the chocolate chip cookie

By Josie Delap

Along with hot dogs, burgers and apple pie, the chocolate chip cookie is one of the stars of American comfort cuisine. Yet like many American foods, its origins lie elsewhere. And contrary to their contemporary reputation as items of indulgence, biscuits used to be seen as a health food.

The first biscuits were austere, little more than twice-baked slices of bread, made by ancient Greeks and Romans (the word “biscuit” in middle English means cooked twice). In the eighth or ninth century, Islamic confectioners decided to sweeten such creations by adding sugar, which at the time was seen as good for you, according to Lizzie Collingham in “The Biscuit: The History of a Very British Indulgence”. Biscuits entered the British culinary repertoire as a nutritional snack sometime around the 16th century, says Collingham. Featuring ingredients such as coriander and aniseed, they were seen as a “form of prophylactic against digestive orders”, a world away from the rich, buttery confections of modern America.

The word cookie almost certainly evolved from the Dutch word koekjes: chocolate chip cookies resemble the confections of northern Europe. The Dutch brought a cornucopia of baked goods with them to the New World, including waffles, doughnuts and a wealth of biscuits. Gradually the term “cookie” came to denote the flat crisp type of baked good, and “biscuit” was used for the fluffier kind that the British would call a scone.

Americans’ appetite for cookies was large and all-embracing – they made snickerdoodles, jumbles, whoopie pies, gingerbread, sugar cookies. But in the first half of the 20th century one type rose to prominence: the chocolate chip. More than any other variety it has come to represent the definitive, all-American cookie. It owes its success in part to its genuine deliciousness. It is also thanks to the involvement of corporate America.

Ruth Wakefield is overwhelmingly credited with inventing the chocolate chip cookie. She and her husband ran the Toll House Restaurant in Whitman, Massachusetts, in the 1930s. According to some versions of the story, when Wakefield ran out of the nuts she needed for her cookies one night, she decided to experiment. Swinging an ice pick, Wakefield chopped a bar of Nestlé semi-sweet chocolate into pieces and added them instead.

The health-giving properties of biscuits defined their early history

Apparently Wakefield expected the fragments to melt, making an evenly chocolatey cookie. Instead the chunks maintained their integrity and the chocolate chip cookie was born. The Nestlé website tells a different tale. The company’s official line is that Wakefield’s addition of chocolate chips was the deliberate decision of a well-trained cook. Either way, the result was a hit. The recipe was published in both a local newspaper and the Toll House recipe book.

Stella Parks, a pastry chef who has written a cookbook of famous American desserts, is sceptical of Wakefield’s role as progenitor of the chocolate chip cookie. As chocolate had become cheaper in the latter half of the 19th century, cooks across the country started adding it to cookies, which they called jumbles. She points out that a recipe printed in newspapers across America in 1877 is strikingly similar to the one that appears on bags of Nestlé chocolate chips today.

What made Wakefield’s cookie different was the role of Nestlé itself. After her recipe was published, sales of the company’s chocolate bars soared in New England. The cookie gained national notoriety when it was featured on a radio programme by “Betty Crocker”, a fictional character used to sell baked goods by General Mills, a big food manufacturer.

In 1940 Wakefield signed a deal with Nestlé that allowed it to feature her recipe on chocolate wrappers and in adverts. Nestlé began pre-scoring its chocolate bars and selling them with a small pick for easy destruction. The company then started making “Toll House Morsels”, pre-chipped chocolate which eventually became known as chocolate chips.

Cookies remained closely associated with Massachusetts. During the second world war wives and mothers from the American state sent them to soldiers serving in Europe. Troops from other states began demanding them too, a marketing opportunity that Nestlé was swift to seize. It ran adverts calling on home bakers to put the limited supplies of chocolate available to good use and bake Toll House cookies for the troops.

Nestlé began selling “Toll House Morsels”: pre-chipped chocolate

In the end Nestlé’s promotion of Wakefield’s recipe was too successful. In 1983 it lost its exclusive right to the “Toll House” cookie trademark, when a judge ruled that it had become merely “a descriptive term for a type of cookie”, namely one with chocolate chips.

The judge was right that all chocolate chip cookies, including Wakefield’s, are fundamentally similar. But small differences between recipes are what make the quest for a perfect cookie so delightful. One distinction is the size. Wakefield’s biscuits were tiny: her recipe for Chocolate Crunch cookies makes 100, each about half an ounce. It calls on the baker to cook them until they are brown and crispy. Cookie inflation has since become rampant. Those at the Levain Bakery, a New York stalwart, come in at about six ounces. The advantage of larger cookies is their textural variety: crisp edges merge into a chewy inner circle before you get to the soft centre.

J. Kenji-López-Alt, an American chef and author of “The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science”, has meticulously unpicked the science behind the ideal chocolate chip cookie. Boost your butter content for a wider, more tender cookie. Melt it for a denser one, cream it for a cakier one. Increase the amount of brown sugar and you’ll get more of a rise on your cookies (it is slightly acidic and reacts with the bicarbonate of soda to create more bubbles, which leaven the bake); lean into the white sugar and you’ll get a flatter confection because white sugar doesn’t have the same effect.

Bread flour, with its higher protein content, will lead to chewier cookies

All-purpose or plain flour, which contains little protein and so promotes less gluten formation, will give you softer cookies; bread flour, with its higher protein content, will lead to chewier ones. Take your lead from the name and use shop-made chocolate chips to give your cookies an even but, arguably, boring distribution of chocolate. Interpret it in a different way and chip away at a block of chocolate, and you will end up with chunks, shards and crumbs which give the cookie a more interesting texture.

Bake the dough as soon as you’ve made it and your cookie will be delicious. Let it rest in the refrigerator overnight, allowing the flour and other ingredients to fully absorb the liquid (mostly the egg) and the drier dough bakes more consistently. Sprinkle it with salt before baking, and you’ll have something even more sublime. Close your eyes, take a bite and bless corporate America.■

Josie Delap is The Economist’s International editor and writes about food for 1843

ILLUSTRATIONS: BETH HOECKEL

RECIPE ILLUSTRATION: JAKE READ

Additional image: Getty