Happy Chocolate Chip Day!

Few things bring a family together faster than a fresh, warm plate of COOKIES!

On May 15th, we recognize a morsel of a thing.  It’s National Chocolate Chip Day!

Have you ever wondered if an ingredient would work in a recipe? It is hard to imagine where we would be without the invention of chocolate chips.

In 1937, Ruth Graves Wakefield of Whitman Massachusetts must have been curious what a little bit of chocolate would add to her cookies. While working at the Toll House Inn, she added cut-up chunks of semi-sweet Nestle chocolate bar to a cookie recipe.  The cookies were a huge success and in 1939 Wakefield signed an agreement with Nestle to add her recipe to the chocolate bar’s packaging.  In exchange for the recipe, Wakefield received a lifetime supply of chocolate.  The Nestle brand Toll House cookies were named for the Inn.

Nestle initially included a small chopping tool with the chocolate bars. Starting in 1941,  Nestle and other competitors started selling the chocolate in chip or morsel form.

Semi-sweet was the original flavor of chocolate chips.  Today the chocolates come in bittersweet, semi-sweet, mint, white chocolate, dark chocolate, milk chocolate, and white and dark swirled.

The imagination is the only thing limiting what recipes chocolate can be used. Today chocolate chips are used in a variety of baking methods from sweet to savory.  Had Ruth Graves Wakefield never wondered what a few chopped up chunks of chocolate would be like in her baking, we wouldn’t even have chocolate chip cookies.

(excerpted from National Day Calendar)