Ruth Wakefield was a U.S. cook who developed the first recipe for the chocolate chip cookie. She ran a popular restaurant with her husband and developed many of the recipes herself. Her work that led to her chocolate chip cookie recipe resulted in the creation of one of the most popular cookies in the world.
Ruth Graves was born on June 17, 1903, in East Walpole, Massachusetts. She grew up in Easton, Massachusetts. After graduating from high school, she attended the Framingham Normal School (now Framingham State University) and studied in the Department of Household Arts. Ruth graduated in 1924. She taught home economics at a high school and later worked in nutrition. In 1926 she married Kenneth Wakefield. Four years later they opened the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts.
The Toll House Inn became popular for its menu. Many of the items Wakefield created herself. In 1931 she released a cookbook, Ruth Wakefield’s Tried and True Recipes. Sometime in the 1930s Wakefield came up with the recipe for chocolate chip cookies. She chopped a Nestlé semisweet chocolate bar into small pieces and dropped them into a cookie batter. The chocolate remained in chunks and did not melt. She called it the Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookie. The recipe appeared in a later edition of her cookbook and was printed in a Boston newspaper. In 1939 Wakefield sold Nestlé the rights to print the recipe on its packages. Soon the company was producing the Nestlé Toll House Real Semi-Sweet Chocolate Morsels. They eventually became known as chocolate chips. The cookie’s popularity grew during World War II (1939–45) when soldiers from Massachusetts shared their care packages from home.
In 1967 Wakefield and her husband sold the Toll House Inn. They retired to Duxbury, Massachusetts, where she died in 1977.
