National Chocolate Chip Day!

Happy National Chocolate Chip Day, everyone!

This day celebrates the chocolate chip, those nice little pieces of chocolate you find in chocolate chip cookies. While recipes for similar confections did exist already, when people think of the chocolate chips in chocolate chip cookies, they think of the Toll House cookie.

The chocolate chip was created in 1937, in Whitman, Massachusetts. They were the creation of a woman named Ruth Graves Wakefield. Wakefield was a chef at the Toll House Inn. The inn was owned by her and her husband Kenneth. She had been looking to improve on the recipes that she was serving at the inn. The urban legend states that she created the chocolate chip cookie by accident.

 In actuality, she really created it out of necessity. She had originally planned to add melting squares of baking chocolate to her cookie batter mixture. Thing was...she was all out.

However, she wasn't completely up the creek. She discovered she still had some Nestle chocolate bars. Using an ice pick, she broke the bars into little pieces. She added the pieces to the batter and baked them. The chunks retained their solidity through the baking process. She served her new cookies...and they became a big hit. 

The chips Wakefield originally used were semi-sweet, but modern chips can come in a variety of flavors, including peanut butter, dark chocolate, and white chocolate. In 1939, Wakefield and Nestle came to an agreement: adding the recipe to her chocolate chip cookies to the packaging of their chocolate bars, and she got a lifetime supply of chocolate. Nestle originally included a small tool to make the bars into chips, but that was short-lived. In 1941, they started selling chocolate in the chip form.

Besides cookies (naturally), chocolate chips can also be added to pastries, cakes, pancakes, and waffles. So, yeah. The little chocolate chip has an interesting little history. Not bad for a little piece of sweetness. Thanks for reading this blog entry! If you liked it, show it off! Take care of yourselves and each other! Stay safe, stay healthy, stay home, wash your hands often, wear a mask, and get your vaccine/booster! See you next time!