Peppercorn Press

Well it seems that after recently publishing our recipe for Russian Tea Cakes, we felt the urge to make more cookies.  This time it was our version of the Chocolate Chip Cookie.   

Chocolate Chip Cookies are one of America’s favorites, and certainly we are no exception.  We each grew up on the Nestle recipe (see the history of chocolate chip cookies below), but as we got older we both found that there were some things about it that frustrated us.  For starters even though we loved them, we realized how sweet they were if you weren’t dunking them in milk — which of course everyone knows that you have to dunk them, but sometimes you just want the cookie without the milk.  Then we also realized that in general, our families were not as fond of crispy cookies as of soft ones; and the Nestle cookie is definitely crispy.  These personal discoveries led us to play with the famous recipe from the Toll House Inn until it suited our tastes.

This variation, suits our tastes very well.  It makes a soft chewy cookie that is great with milk, coffee or by itself.  It is satisfyingly sweet, but not too sweet.  Over the years we have had many complements on these cookies and several requests for the recipe, which until now we have kept all to ourselves.  We hope that you will try our treasured recipe and that you and your friends and family will enjoy it as much as we have with ours.

Ingredients

4 ½ cups all purpose flour

2 teaspoon baking soda

2 teaspoons table salt

1 cup butter at room temperature

1 cup butter flavor shortening

¾ cup sugar

1 ½ cup light brown sugar, firmly packed

4 teaspoons vanilla

4 large eggs at room temperature

4 cups milk chocolate chips

Preparation

Sift together flour, soda and salt in a mixing bowl.  Set aside.  Cream together butter, shortening, sugar, brown sugar and vanilla. Add eggs beating until fluffy.  Add the flour mixture one spoon at a time, incorporating each spoonful before adding the next.  When all of the flour mixture is incorporated, stir in the chocolate chips.

Refrigerate the dough for one hour. 

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Form dough into 1 ½” balls and place on an un-greased baking sheet, approximately 3″ apart.  Bake for 9-12 minutes.  The secret to this recipe here is to look at the finish on the cookies.  If the surface is still shiny, they need to bake a little longer.  Once they loose their doughy sheen, its time to take them out of the oven.  Cool on the pan only for a couple of minutes, then remove to a wire rack to cool completely.

Makes approximately 48 cookies.

“When was the chocolate chip cookie invented?”

Most people know that the Nestle Toll House Cookie was invented in 1933 at the Toll House Inn, however, how the actual invention came about seems to be in dispute.  There are several places where you can read about the official Nestle version of the events that led to the famous cookie, but according to Wikipedia, the story may not be true:

“There are conflicting stories about the origin of the chocolate chip cookie and the acquisition of the recipe by Nestlé. The commonality between the two stories is that the chocolate chip cookie was accidentally developed by Ruth Wakefield in 1933. Mrs. Wakefield owned the Toll House Inn, in Whitman, Massachusetts, a very popular restaurant in the 1930s. The restaurant’s popularity was not just due to its home-cooked style meals; Mrs. Wakefield’s policy was to give diners a whole extra helping of their entrées to take home with them and a serving of her homemade cookies for dessert. Mrs. Wakefield’s cookbook, Toll House Tried and True Recipes, was published in 1936 by M. Barrows & Company, New York. Included is the recipe for the Toll House Cookie, originally called the Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookie.

 

Nestlé version

Mrs. Wakefield was making chocolate cookies but ran out of regular baker’s chocolate, so she substituted it with broken pieces of semi-sweet chocolate, thinking that it would melt and mix into the batter. It clearly did not, and the chocolate chip cookie was born. Wakefield sold the recipe to Nestlé in exchange for a lifetime supply of chocolate chips. Every bag of Nestlé chocolate chips in North America has a variation of her original recipe printed on the back (butter and margarine are now both included as variants).

During WWII, GIs from Massachusetts who were stationed overseas shared the cookies they received in care packages from back home, with soldiers from other parts of the U.S. Soon, hundreds of GIs were writing home asking their families to send them some Toll House Cookies, and Mrs. Wakefield was soon inundated with letters from around the country asking for her recipe. Thus, began the nation-wide craze for the chocolate chip cookie.

 

Toll House Inn version

Mrs. Carol Cavanagh, of Brockton, Massachusetts and a former employee of the Inn, and her father, George Boucher of South Dennis, MA and the former head chef at the Toll House Inn during the years of its operation, offer a different history of the cookie. Contradicting Nestlé’s claim that Mrs. Wakefield put chunks of chocolate into cookie dough hoping they would melt, Mrs. Cavanagh states that Mrs. Wakefield was already an accomplished chef and author of a cookbook, and knew enough about the properties of chocolate that it would not melt and mix into the batter while baking. Mr. Boucher states that Mrs. Wakefield was known for her sugar cookies, which came free with every meal, and were for sale in the inn’s lobby. One day, while mixing a batch of the sugar cookie dough, the vibrations from a large Hobart electric mixer caused bars of Nestlé’s chocolate stored on the shelf above the mixer to fall into the mixing bowl, where it was broken up and incorporated into the dough. Mrs. Wakefield believed the dough was ruined and was about to discard it, when Mr. Boucher stopped her and talked her into saving the batch. His reasoning was out of frugality rather than a prediction of the cookie’s future popularity.

Mrs. Cavanagh states that Mrs. Wakefield did not sell the ownership of the recipe to Nestlé, but she only gave them rights to print her recipe on the packages of their chocolate morsels. Later, Nestlé’s lawyers found loopholes in the initial agreement that ceded the rights to the recipe from Mrs. Wakefield, and began mass-producing the cookies.”