Legend has it that in 1937, Ruth Graves Wakefield, the head of the restaurant at Toll House Inn, was baking what she called “Butter Drop Do” cookies. When she realized she’d run out of baker’s chocolate, she improvised. Ruth chopped up a semisweet chocolate candy bar and folded it into the dough, expecting it to melt and make chocolate cookies. (Spoiler alert: they didn’t!)
What makes this story more interesting is that the chocolate Ruth used was a Nestle bar given to her directly by a member of the Nestle family. Once her cookies became popular, the company offered her one dollar and a lifetime of chocolate to purchase the rights to the recipe and the Toll House name. She accepted, and history was made.
