Another one of the articles that was fun to research. This week, I made a big batch of chocolate chip cookies for Frank. I packed a bit of extra nutrition in them by substituting a cup of quick-cook oatmeal for a cup of the flour, and adding chopped pecans. Here in the South you must add pecans wherever you can. I freeze the dough balls and bake the cookies a dozen at a time. If I baked 'em all at once, I'd eat 'em all at once.
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| These are what we use toady as chips for our cookies (I prefer the Hershey Special Dark myself.) |
They’re out there, but very hard to find: those without a sweet tooth, those who never, ever savored a chocolate chip cookie. Breathes there a man with soul so dead, who never to himself has said “this chocolate chip cookie is as American as baseball and apple pie.”
It is American.
The exact date on which the first chocolate chip cookie was baked is not
precisely known, but it was somewhere early in 1938, some 80 years ago, that
the idea of them came to Ruth Graves Wakefield. At the time, she owned the Toll
House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts – thus their original name: Toll House
Cookies. The chefs at the inn were very creative, so much so that they produced
the classic cookbook Toll House Tried and
True Recipes. The 1977 edition is still available. People were eager to follow
the recipes of this very fine establishment. Evidently, the Massachusetts boys
serving during World War II got the cookies in care packages from home, and
shared them with their buddies. The joy of them spread like cookie dough in a
hot oven.
The first chips were just that: chips off the chocolate on
hand for the chefs at the inn, and technically, if it’s called a Toll House
cookie, it is pristine: just the basic original recipe cookie dough with chips
of chocolate.
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| These are more like the chips of chocolate used at the Toll House Inn |
They say that if you change at least three ingredients in a
recipe you can consider it yours. There have been so many changes to the
original Toll House Cookies recipe that today’s recipes are anybody’s. Even the
recipe on a Nestlé’s “morsels” departs from the original, substituting butter
or margarine for the original shortening. The recipes today are as many and
varied as those for spaghetti sauce or the many other foods that have become
fixtures on American tables.
Chips are no longer chips: they’re extruded drops. And they
are no longer just chocolate: they can also be semi-sweet, bitter-sweet, white chocolate,
butterscotch, peanut butter, cinnamon, even mint. And chips can be regular
size, chunks, or minis. To the dough you can beat in oatmeal, cocoa, walnut,
pecans, hazelnuts, macadamias, raisins, dried cranberries, toffee, tiny marshmallows,
and what? The beat goes on. Are they still chocolate chip cookies? Probably yes, if there is still some
chocolate in them.
The original drop cookie of about 2½ to 3 inches in diameter
has grown. Some big, fat five-inchers are pikers. Chocolate chip cookies can be
found in pita, plate, and pizza-size portions. We Americans like to make
everything bigger, but Cookie Monster might consider some of those larger
versions to be monstrosities, both size-wise and taste-wise.
National Chocolate Chip Day is celebrate every year on May
15. National Cookie Day is December 4 (time to start baking for the holidays) and,
put them together and you get National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day on August 4. You might want to find other reasons (your Mother-in-law’s
birthday, your neighbor’s new car) to celebrate with chocolate chip cookies. It
is the American thing to do.
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