From
the beginning, my association with chocolate chip cookies was built on
love. In my grandmother’s kitchen, she
and I would make the Toll House cookie recipe right on the Nestles chip bag. To thoroughly mix the butter and sugars,
Grandmother Jewel would use her hands, and I suspect my hands got in on that
before I was very old. Going to spend
the night with her at her one bedroom apartment usually meant there would be
cookie baking, Frito munching and fun.
Although she lived only five minutes away from my house, these
overnights were something I looked forward to.
I’m sure cookie
baking and eating were woven into my years growing up, and I did develop an
interest in baking myself as a teenager.
“In the olden days,” as my grown daughter calls them, there were no
specialty cookie stores in nearby malls.
The cookies, cakes and pies eaten at our house were baked in somebody’s
kitchen. Even in the 50s and 60s there
were bakeries, but I don’t remember purchasing our “sweet tooth” items at them
or even in the grocery stores. Something
I do remember is buying some outstanding chocolate chips cookies in the high
school cafeteria; perhaps this is when my discriminating appreciation for
thicker, gooier versions was born.
Nothing stands out
in my memories of cookie baking and eating until after I began teaching in high
school (the same one I attended) and got married. My husband and I were back in touch with two
of my high school friends who married each other. Jan and I had become very good friends in
junior high; she and Randy moved to an apartment very close to the neighborhood
we lived in. Randy had a younger sister
who had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and had declined rather quickly. Her parents had remodeled their home in a
small town not far from St. Louis to accommodate her increasing disability.
On a visit to
Randy’s parent’s house, a brownie-like version of chocolate chip cookies made
its entrance into our family narrative of Toll House affection. By this time, Randy’s sister, now in her twenties,
was bedridden, and it was clear that her parents greatly welcomed loving
friends and visitors coming to their country home. I have no idea what our lunch was that day,
but the dessert, gooey chocolate chip brownies, was a hit from the first bite. Of course, I asked for the recipe. To this day, I never bake the brownies
without thinking of this day spent with people so overwhelmed with difficulty. Their daughter died not long after our visit.
After teaching
four years, I moved into a full time homemaker role with the birth of our first
child, Bonnie. After she and her little
brother were settled in, I continued in the spirit of both of my grandmothers
really, baking cookies and brownies as before now adding sourdough bread making
to the baking routine. That little jar
of starter in my refrigerator needed to be fed every week and also used to make
bread. Definitely, my baking repertoire
had expanded but my attention was quickly turned back to those wonderful
brownies in a rather public way.
Before the demise
of suburban journals in our area, every week the North County Journal featured a local cook, running a picture,
story and recipe. I still have a copy of
the picture taken in our backyard of me holding a pan of chocolate chip
brownies. A part time writer about my
age had come to the house to interview me for the story section of the
feature. As I shared some of “my story”
with her, she shared some with me. She,
too, was a young mom home with children about the same age as mine. She thought of herself as a writer whereas I
thought of myself more as a teacher.
However, she encouraged me to check into doing some “stringer” work
(freelance writer) for the journal. And
thus my writing “career” (very loose use of the word career) was born—partly
because of that delicious chocolate chip brownie recipe.
I did eventually
interview with the Journal editor who said her gut told her to “take a chance
on a former English teacher” for some human interest stories even though her
experiences hiring English teachers had not been positive ones. Fortunately for both of us, covering some
stories went well, and I even stayed in touch with the lady who had interviewed
me. Again, trailing behind a chocolate
chip recipe shared in the community, more of a narrative of my life as a
teacher continued.
It was actually
through a Journal connection that I found out I had a chance for employment at
the nearby community college. I hadn’t
even considered looking for part time work there since I did not have a
master’s degree. Another former English
teacher working as a stringer for the Journal passed along some materials to me
as she handed over her regular feature highlighting various churches in the
area. She was also teaching GED classes
at an auto factory nearby through the Continuing Education program at the
college. Following up her tip to seek work
opportunities at the school led to my getting an adjunct job teaching
developmental English; doing this required only a bachelor’s degree.
Our children were
growing up and life became busier with working and caring for parents with
health difficulties. Baking anything was
much lower on the list of priorities.
The sourdough starter bit the dust early on. But always there were opportunities for those
chocolate chip creations, and a very special one evolved after my father had
been placed on hospice care and was spending what would be the last few months
of his life at a skilled nursing facility.
Dad had retired
about 15 years before this, and he had become the chief cook and shopper for my
mother and him. He was not a baker, but
he was an appreciator—and lucky recipient—of some of the baking I still
did. So, when I visited him at the nursing
facility, I would keep a steady supply of homemade chocolate chips cookies in
his room for him to snack on. Soon he
began offering cookies to his hospice nurse, Lana, a wonderful and kind caregiver
who had just started working as a hospice nurse. It became a much-enjoyed ritual for the two
of them to have a cookie at the beginning of her frequent visits. Many cookies
later, I think they truly came to love one another over the course of those few
months. They were both special people.
Between this time
and the next major chocolate chip event some years passed by. Our daughter graduated from college and came
back to St. Louis to work on a master’s degree.
After completing that, she got a job teaching high school history and
moved into an apartment with a friend who also got her first teaching job. Both of them liked to bake and entertain
friends and family, and it wasn’t long before Bonnie had breathed new life into
the chocolate chip brownie recipe. She
served it to guests and often took it to pot luck gatherings. This brought the recipe front and center in
my life again, and I, too, started making the brownies—always a hit—more often.
Even before
looking up the origin of Tollhouse cookies, I was aware that their beginnings
were just by chance. What was first
constructed in 1709 as a toll house was purchased by Kenneth and Ruth Wakefield
to become a lodge. The Cape Cod style
construction was built as a place to pay tolls, change horses, and enjoy some
home-cooked meals for those traveling from Boston to New Bedford,
Massachusetts. The Wakefields thus
called it The Tollhouse Inn, and Ruth’s Butter Drop Do cookies became a
favorite. One day she added some bits of
a semi-sweet chocolate bar, thinking the chocolate would melt and flavor all
the dough. However, the chocolate didn’t
actually melt, thus becoming distinct bits of chocolate in the cookies. Since people liked them, she kept making
them, and the recipe eventually was published in a Boston paper. Ruth, a clever business woman in her day,
brokered a deal with Nestle to put her recipe on its chocolate bar in exchange
for a lifetime supply of this now much-in-demand baking item. In 1939, Nestle started producing the
chocolate in chip form for ease in handling.
What began at an Inn now numbers up to 7 billion cookies annually, half
of the cookie consumption worldwide.
In a broader
sense, the real tollhouse was built with a very important purpose: in effect, it was a haven for weary
travelers. From its beginning, I would
be willing to bet that there was a large portion of love in the service of
offering relief for tired folk in days of far more difficult travel. I would not have called myself a weary
traveler in those first encounters with mixing chocolate chip cookies at my
grandmother’s. That identification has
come later in life. But just as love
threads through the narrative of chocolate chips in my own life experiences, I
imagine hospitality and simple kindness, wonderful and ageless Christian
virtues, were offered with those necessary services at that early tollhouse
which later became The Tollhouse Inn.
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