The chocolate chip cookie was invented by a lady named Ruth Wakefield in 1933 and, like many great recipes today, was discovered by accident. Ruth owned the Toll House Inn, located in Whitman, Massachusetts, which was a very popular place for good home-cooked meals.

They say Ruth used to make chocolate chip cookies with bakery chocolate, but one day she ran out of chocolate and only had access to a semi-sweet chocolate from Nestlé, so she broke the bar into pieces and mixed them into the dough thinking it would melt and melt. I would mix with her. And of course, the chocolate pieces weren’t mixed together like the bakers’ chocolate and the Nestle Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookie was born.

Ruth Wakefield later sold the recipe to Nestlé in exchange for a lifetime supply of chocolate chips. Since then, Nestlé has printed the recipe on the back of every bag of chocolate chips it has sold in North America with a slight variation being the option to use margarine over butter.

During World War II, Nestle Toll House cookies were sent to soldiers in Massachusetts, who then shared them with other American soldiers from different parts of the states. This led to several soldiers writing home asking for cookies from the Nestlé toll house, which led to many people contacting Ruth wanting her recipe, sparking a nationwide craze for these delicious cookies.

However, the history of chocolate chip cookies has more than one story. George Boucher and his daughter Carol Cavanagh worked together at the toll house inn and Carol claims that Wakefield, as an experienced baker and book editor, would know the ownership of chocolate and know that it would not melt or mix.

Boucher claims the real story is that his electric mixer knocked some Nestle chocolate off the shelf into his sugar cookie mix due to vibrations and it mixed and formed chunks of chocolate in the mix. Boucher claims that Wakefield wanted to throw the mixture away because in his eyes it was ruined, but he wanted to keep it and bake it.

And so he did by forming chocolate chip cookies. Who knows if his story is true or not, but it very well could be.