Overlooked No More: Ruth Wakefield, Who Invented the Chocolate Chip Cookie (Published 2018) (2024)

Legend has it that Wakefield was trying a variation on a butterscotch dessert when she decided to let the chocolate chips fall where they may.

Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. With Overlooked, we’re adding the stories of remarkable people.

Around the time Ruth Wakefield began making a chocolate chip cookie in the 1930s, naming newly invented treats after something or someone was in vogue.

Case in point: the Baby Ruth chocolate-covered nutty nougat bar, purportedly named for Grover Cleveland’s daughter. Wakefield’s confection was known originally as the Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookie, after the Toll House Inn, a popular restaurant that she ran with her husband in eastern Massachusetts.

Legend had it that she was brainstorming about cookie dough while returning from a vacation in Egypt when she first came up with the recipe, a variation on another popular treat called Butter Drop Do pecan icebox cookies.

“We had been serving a thin butterscotch nut cookie with ice cream,” Wakefield recalled in a 1970s interview. “Everybody seemed to love it, but I was trying to give them something different.”

Her original plan was said to have involved melting squares of Baker’s chocolate (unsweetened, with no milk or flavoring) and adding it to the blond batter. But, supposedly, the only chocolate she had available was a Nestlé semisweet bar, and she was too rushed to melt it.

Wielding an ice pick, she chopped the bar into pea-size bits and dribbled them into the brown sugar dough with nuts. (Susan Brides, a pastry chef, assisted.) Instead of melting into the dough to produce an all-chocolate cookie, the bits remained chunky as they baked.