Chocolate Chip Cookies

One day in 1937 when Ruth Wakefield of the Toll House in Of Whitman, Massachusetts, was making chocolate cookies, she realized she was out of the powdered chocolate she usually used. But she did have a bar of semi-sweet chocolate, which she chopped up and added to the batter. The dark morsels melted just enough to create soft little lodes of chocolate throughout the cookie. She named her creation Toll House Crunch Cookies, and by 1940 the recipe appeared on the wrapper of Nestle semi-sweet chocolate bars. In 1997, the chocolate chip cookie became the official cookie of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Variations abound: chocolate chunk cookies, chocolate chocolate chip cookies (made with cocoa-infused dough), cookies in which M&Ms take the place of chocolate chips, peanut-butter flavored chocolate chip cookies, and white chocolate chip cookies.