DEL.ICIO.USFor the Journal-Constitution
Published on: 09/15/05
One cup butter, 3/4 cup granulated sugar, 3/4 cup brown sugar ...
That's the notable start to the Toll House cookie recipe, and if you like to bake, you probably know the rest by heart. For many of us, it's the recipe by which our mothers introduced us to the chemical wonders and sensory pleasures of baking; the one by which we learned to cream butter and sugar together, to break eggs, to "test" the dough when no one was looking.
 Charlotte B. Teagle/AJC | |||
| Chocolate Chip Banana Cheesecake | |||
 Charlotte B. Teagle/AJC | |||
| Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookie Milkshake | |||
 Charlotte B. Teagle/AJC | |||
| Chocolate Chip Caramel Nut Bars | |||
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MOST POPULARThat's what I was thinking the other day while making my zillionth batch of chocolate chip cookies. Even though I turn on my oven several times a week, I can honestly say it's the only baking recipe I've ever bothered to memorize. And so I improvise upon it endlessly.
That sounds like a pretty reasonable idea for a newspaper story, doesn't it? But every good story needs a news peg, so I hit the Internet, wondering if, by any chance, this was some sort of anniversary year for Toll House cookies.
Bingo! History after history that I read pinned the invention of the Toll House cookie to 1930, making it a tidy 75 years old.
At least, that's what I thought at first. But the more I looked, the more I saw different accounts for when the cookie came into being.
So maybe it's 75; maybe it's not. But what the heck. It's still a great recipe. And one day this year — who knows exactly when? — the Toll House cookie will turn another year older. Hooray.
Either way, all hail Ruth Wakefield. She's the woman who, in 1930 (or perhaps 1933 or 1937 ... let's just say in the '30s), got creative with a batch of Butter Drop Do cookies, a recipe dating to Colonial times. She added some chopped chocolate, expecting it to melt and blend with the dough during baking. Instead, Wakefield was surprised to find that the chocolate stayed put, turning into little gooey chunks during baking. She served the cookies to her guests at the Toll House Inn near Whitman, Mass., and thus sparked a sensation.
A few newspapers in New England ran the recipe, and regional sales of the Nestlé Semi-Sweet Chocolate Bar took off. Wakefield, a savvy businesswoman, worked out a deal with the company that permitted Nestlé to print the recipe on its wrapper and provided Wakefield with free chocolate for life.
As the recipe's popularity grew, Nestlé started scoring the bar and providing a special chopper in the package. It wasn't until 1939 — Nestlé is quite certain of this — that the company began selling chocolate chips.
Ahem. That's "morsels," as Nestlé's representatives politely yet firmly insist. Those little yellow bags of chocolate tidbits — and all the copycat brands — were formulated specifically for use in a single cookie recipe.
So what is it about this recipe? What is it about that combination of sugars, that blend of sweet and salty, of melty and crumbly, that has spoken so beguilingly to generations of taste buds? What is it that turned the utilitarian name of a little lodge into a household word, that prompted an international company to launch an entire product line?
"Actually, the answer to that is almost a little too boring," conceded Paula Figoni, a food scientist and author of the textbook "How Baking Works" (Wiley, $35). "It's just a nice balance."
Humans are born liking sugar, she said, and after a few months, we develop a fondness for saltiness as well. Butterfat has a comforting mouth-feel. And the mysterious combination of granulated and brown sugar, well, that's about balance, too. A little brown sugar adds color and flavor, but too much of it might overpower the butter, vanilla and chocolate.
"A lot of chefs before thought brown sugar would give you moistness and tenderness, and it's certainly true that the molasses that is in brown sugar gives you moistness," Figoni explained. "But there's so little — brown sugar is about 8 [percent] to 10 percent molasses — that it's really just about color and flavor."
The appeal might have something to do with nostalgia, too. "It's just such a food memory for so many people," said Jenny Harper, a senior culinary specialist with Nestlé. "It's a childhood memory that has been passed down through the generations."
Harper, a 20-year Nestlé veteran who has worked with the Toll House brand for the past eight years, said she grew up with the cookie, too.
"It was a recipe my mom always made," Harper recalled. "Now I have a 10-year-old, and we started making Toll House cookies when she was old enough to stand up on a chair in the kitchen." Harper's mother rarely ventured from the recipe printed on the package and, indeed, it's a hard recipe to improve upon, said Harper, whose job involves supervising the company's baking division test kitchens. Even if she could go back in time and offer her input on the original recipe, she wouldn't do much. "Personally I wouldn't change the basic ingredients behind the recipe, meaning the ratio," she said. "However, I would just bring it up a notch perhaps by toasting the nuts. I prefer pecans."
Some people like to add orange zest or cinnamon; others increase the vanilla extract or vary the kind of morsels, Harper said. She discouraged the common online recommendation of melting the butter first, as this tends to yield a flat, unairy cookie. For people who omit the nuts, Harper suggested increasing the flour by a tablespoon or two.
Figoni — who once visited the burned ruins of the Toll House Inn — confessed that she no longer made the cookies because they're too fattening. But if she were to make them, she'd replace half the butter with vegetable shortening — to allow the chocolate flavor to come through clearly — and she'd reduce the amount of baking soda, as she does not care for the metallic taste of the leavening agent and prefers a taller cookie, anyway. For those who want a softer cookie, she'd suggest replacing about ? cup of the granulated sugar with corn syrup. "That's going to give you a little bit more moistness," she said.
I like to add stuff. I almost always keep the basic recipe just as it is, except that I vary the nuts or skip them altogether. And then I stir in some dried fruit or some oats or some chopped candy, and then I sometimes add some flavoring, like cinnamon or nutmeg, or some sort of funky extract. A few of my favorite improvisations — Carrot-Raisin Chocolate Chip, Cranberry Almond Chocolate Chip and Choco-Coco Chip — appear below as variations to the original recipe.
Such changes, however, are mere tweaks to a time-proven formula.
"I don't know how else I would improve it, it's good as it is," said Harper, who admitted to occasionally gobbling entire cookies during daily company taste tests.
"I tell you, we are the most popular kitchen in the whole building."
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