What is National Chocolate Chip Day?
On National Chocolate Chip Day, we recognize a morsel of a thing on National Chocolate Chip Day on May 15th.
Have you ever wondered how a single ingredient could alter a dish? Have you ever wondered how a single ingredient could change a dish? It would be difficult to imagine where we would be without chocolate chips if it weren't for one particular baker.
Ruth Graves Wakefield of Whitman Massachusetts, 1937, must have been curious about what a little bit of chocolate would add to her cookies. She used cut-up pieces of a semi-sweet Nestle chocolate bar to a cookie dish while working at Toll House Inn. The cookies were a huge success, and Wakefield signed an agreement with Nestle in 1939 to add her recipe to the chocolate bar's packaging. Wakefield received a lifetime supply of chocolate in exchange for the dish. Inn was named for the Nestle brand Toll House cookies.
Nestle first included a small chopping knife with the chocolate bars, as well. Nestle and other Nestle and other manufacturers began offering the chocolate in chip or morsel form starting in 1941. For the first time, bakers began making chocolate chip cookies without chopping up the chocolate bar first.
Chocolate chips were originally sold in semi-sweet form. Chocolate makers began offering bittersweet, semi-sweet, mint, white chocolate, dark chocolate, milk chocolate, and white and dark swirled. Today, chips also come in a variety of other flavors that bakers and candy makers use imaginatively in their kitchens.
