Usually accompanied by a glass of milk or a cup of hot tea or coffee, chocolate chip cookies are well balanced between salty and sweet in flavor, tenderly chewy in texture, and filled with small melting chocolate pyramids, bringing a generation of Americans back to their childhood.
The origin story of these sweet treats is incredibly interesting, almost as the cookies themselves. The Toll House Inn was a popular bed-and-breakfast in Whitman, Massachusetts, bought by Ruth Graves Wakefield and her husband in 1930. Ruth's cooking was so good that the inn gained an excellent reputation in a short span of time.
Ruth was baking chocolate cookies when she found out that she didn't have any more baker's chocolate. Instead, she used a new, semisweet chocolate that she got from her friend Andrew Nestlé, broke it into small pieces, and places them in her batter for buttered sugar cookies.
The chocolate didn't melt like she thought it would, and the result was a cookie that Ruth originally called the Toll House chocolate crunch cookie. The Boston press published her recipe, and the sales of both Nestlé chocolate and the cookies skyrocketed.