Was the Chocolate Chip Cookie an Accident? Ruth Wakefield's Story

The story everyone tells

Ruth and Kenneth Wakefield bought a house in Whitman, Massachusetts, in 1930 and ran it as the Toll House, a restaurant. The famous version of what happened next comes in two flavors.

In one, Wakefield was making an old-fashioned butter cookie, ran out of nuts and chopped up a Nestlé semisweet bar instead. In the other, the one Nestlé has told, she ran short of baking chocolate and expected the chopped bar to melt into a chocolate dough, then was surprised when the pieces held their shape. Either way, the moral is luck.

What Wakefield herself said

Wakefield was not a cook who stumbled into things. She graduated from the household arts program at what is now Framingham State University and worked as a hospital dietitian and a high school home economics teacher before the Toll House.

In the 1970s, a few years before her death in 1977, she brushed off the accident stories. She told interviewers the restaurant had been serving a thin butterscotch nut cookie with ice cream that everyone liked, and that she wanted to give guests "something different." The Library of Congress, citing MassLive's reporting, notes she said she cut the chocolate bar on purpose. Carolyn Wyman, author of a history of the cookie, sides with Wakefield: nothing at that restaurant, she has said, seemed to happen by accident.

The 1938 printing

Exactly when she first baked it is unclear; accounts run from 1930 to 1938. What is documented is the print date. The 1938 edition of her cookbook, Toll House Tried and True Recipes, was the first to include the recipe, which she called the Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookie.

A 1940 printing held by the Library of Congress shows how close the original is to what we bake now: butter, brown and white sugar, eggs, flour, baking soda, chopped nuts and Nestlé semisweet bars cut into pea-size pieces. She dropped the dough by the half teaspoon for about 100 small cookies. Our Toll House chocolate chip cookies follow the bag recipe Nestlé still prints, with rounded tablespoons instead.

The Nestlé deal

After the recipe got some publicity, Nestlé asked in 1939 to print her recipe on its semisweet bars. At her suggestion the company scored the bars so they were easier to break, and in 1940 it started selling the chocolate in small pieces, the first mass-market chocolate chips.

What she got in return is fuzzier. The usual telling is a single dollar plus free chocolate for life and work as a recipe consultant, but those terms come from later retellings, not a published contract. In 1983 a federal judge ruled that Nestlé no longer had exclusive rights to the Toll House name, and the restaurant itself burned down on New Year's Eve 1984.

Massachusetts law now names the chocolate chip cookie the official cookie of the commonwealth. The bakery-size descendants have grown huge, like our Levain-style chocolate chip walnut cookies, and you can compare them with the rest of the family in our cookies hub.

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