101 Stumbles in the March of History by Bill Fawcett

Author:Bill Fawcett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-07-20T11:54:06+00:00

51

MY FAVORITE MISTAKE

1930

By Bill Fawcett

Best when they are still warm.

In 1930, the owner of the Toll House Inn, a high-quality boardinghouse in Whitman, Massachusetts, had a problem. The inn always provided cookies as a snack for their guests. The owner and baker, Ruth Wakefield, had made sugar cookies several times that week and planned on a change. She hoped to make cocoa-flavored sugar cookies, which were always popular. But there was a problem. She was out of cocoa powder. Like most bakers, though, Ms. Wakefield was skilled at improvising with her recipes, and she did have some Nestlé chocolate bars on hand.

As she later explained, chocolate melted easily, and so if she broke up the bars and mixed them in the dough, she would have her chocolate sugar cookies. As it turned out, when the cookies came out of the oven, the chocolate had not fully melted. What she had were sugar cookies with small chunks of chocolate spread through them . . . and they were an instant hit. By mistake, she had invented the chocolate chip cookie.

The Toll House recipes were popular, and word quickly spread about this new and delicious cookie. Nestlé’s sales in New England jumped as more and more bakers served chocolate chip cookies. When the company realized why their chocolate was suddenly so much more popular, they approached Ruth Wakefield about putting her Toll House chocolate chip recipe on every bag of their chocolate chips.

Now comes the reason why this is my favorite mistake ever. Ms. Wakefield agreed that the company could use her recipe, which, to this day, is still on every bag of Nestlé’s chocolate chips. What, you may ask, was her price? It was ALL THE CHOCOLATE SHE WANTED FOR THE REST OF HER LIFE.

How did this mistake change the world? How many extra pounds have we added because of Ruth Wakefield’s mistake? Aren’t we glad it happened? Yumm.

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