1940s Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookies

Despite WWII rationing, food historians report that sugar consumption spiked in the '40s. This cookie could be largely responsible :) Created by Ruth Wakefield in the 1930s for service at her family's Toll House Inn, just outside Whitman, MA, the cookie quickly caught the attention of both Nestle, who bought the rights to put the recipe on its chocolate packages—and Betty Crocker, who featured the cookie on her “Famous Foods from Famous Places” radio show in 1939. That show, plus the '40s newspaper ads Nestle ran with the recipe, launched the cookie into still-glowing stardom. Wakefield's original recipe was made by breaking up two, seven-ounce bars of Nestle's Semi Sweet chocolate into pea-sized bits. Once Nestle started manufacturing the bits as Nestle's Semi-Sweet morsels, that became the standard. Here's the recipe from the 1948 edition of Wakefield's “Toll House Tried and True Recipes.”