Oh, chocolate chip cookie. You have turned 75 this year and yet you’re as seductive and sexy as the day you were created at the Toll House Inn. You’re eternally youthful. You’re forever, like a pastry diamond. You’re the Helen Mirren of cookies.
But why have you endured for aeons, chocolate chip cookie? Why did Ruth Wakefield make you; why did you exist long enough for us to enjoy you? The New Yorker has the answer, and it has to do with Hitler (kind of):
Ingesting a warm chocolate-chip cookie offered the eaters a brief respite from their quotidian woe. America’s entry into the Second World War only enhanced the popularity of Wakefield’s creation. Toll House cookies were a common constituent in care packages shipped to American soldiers overseas. Though chocolate was in short supply domestically because of the war effort, women on the home front were encouraged to use what little they had to bake cookies for “that soldier boy of yours,” as one Nestlé ad put it. The Toll House restaurant’s gift shop alone sent thousands of cookies to uniformed servicemen abroad. “Like Spam and Coca-Cola,” Wyman writes, “chocolate chip cookies’ fame was boosted by wartime soldier consumption. Before the war they were a largely East Coast-based fad; after Toll House cookies rivaled apple pie as the most popular dessert recipe in the country.”
Chocolate chip cookies punched Hitler in the face.
But really, for a true history of the chocolate chip cookie, read below.
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