Accept Cookies: Toll House, specifically

A little while ago, I was asked to contribute to a Slate article on the most important recipes of the last hundred years. Obviously, my immediate response was to nominate the chocolate chip cookie. Slate published their article today, and they included a couple of lines that I wrote in the piece, but I thought I would share my full essay / cookie manifesto here.

The most important recipe of the last hundred years: 
Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookies, by Ruth Wakefield

For most of my life, I thought of chocolate chip cookies the same way I thought of gravity, fire, or electricity: a phenomenon of nature, a fundamental force that has always been around. But no, the chocolate chip cookie was invented by an American woman named Ruth Graves Wakefield, sometime in the late 1930s. There might be nonagenarians alive right now who could remember a time before the chocolate chip cookie—but my god, why would you want to?

Ruth Wakefield and her husband Kenneth owned the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts, and as part of her duties there, Ruth cooked for the guests. One day, while making dessert, she chopped up a Nestlé chocolate bar and added it to butter cookie dough, and lo, the heavens opened up and the angels sang. She called her new invention Chocolate Crunch Cookies. The cookies quickly became so popular that Nestlé heard about them, and in what must have been one of the very first influencer collabs, they printed her recipe on Nestlé bar wrappers, calling them Toll House Cookies. Later, Nestlé would take out the need for home bakers to chop up the chocolate bars by producing a new product: chocolate morsels. And over time, the recipe would become the single most reliable source of joy in my life: the chocolate chip cookie.

During the pandemic, I devoted several weeks to learning to bake cookies, so I could develop and deepen my appreciation for them, and experiment with ideas of my own. I don't pretend to be a baker in any kind of way; I just have a lifelong love affair with this food. You can never eat a chocolate chip cookie and not feel a little bit happier. 

I rely on that comfort all the time. In my life as a musician and as a podcast host, I travel a lot. Often, when I’m in a new city, I have just a few hours to explore before my gig that night and a departure the next morning. So, I’ve developed a shortcut to satisfy both my wanderlust and my sweet tooth: I ask locals to tell me where I can find that city’s best chocolate chip cookie. It’s a little treasure hunt that I get to go on that leads me to cafes, bakeries, and grocery stores, in neighborhoods I might not see otherwise, and it always culminates in a bit of delicious pleasure. Even when a chocolate chip cookie isn’t the greatest cookie I’ve ever had, it’s still great.

So, thank you to Ruth Wakefield for inventing something that is so ubiquitous and so loved that its invention seems unfathomable. I cannot think of a recipe more influential and iconic, and even if I could, my god, why would I want to?

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In other dessert news, Mom’s Mango Pie Ice Cream is back this month at Salt & Straw, as part of their limited edition Thanksgiving menu. I’m so touched that they’ve brought this flavor back for the third year in a row. I wrote in depth about the origins of the pie and this ice cream flavor collaboration a couple years ago, when it first debuted; you can read that issue of the newsletter here. If you can’t get to a Salt & Straw location, you can order pints shipped anywhere in the US. If you’ve had it before and liked it, leave a review on the Salt & Straw page, and maybe they’ll keep bringing it back!

The last two episodes of Song Exploder are the first two episodes with a different format for the show. Both episodes are about classic songs (though from different eras and with very different sounds). One is with Graham Nash about “Our House” by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and the other is with Kathleen Hanna and Johanna Fateman of Le Tigre about their song “Deceptacon.” For these new ones, instead of editing my voice out of the interview entirely, I left a lot of my questions in, and more of the back-and-forth dynamic of the conversation. The format change felt quite dramatic to me, but so far, no one has really remarked on the format change. And I think, ultimately, that’s great! But I thought I’d solicit some feedback explicitly. If you’re familiar with the podcast, do these episodes feel any different to you? And if so, do you like them more, less, or the same as the way the show has been for the past 10+ years?

Last of the links: I’m on Bluesky, if you’re one of the millions of people who have recently signed up over there. If you find my last post on there…some spoilers for next month. And, I’ve recently added to my ever-growing Spotify playlist of mellow, contemplative songs, NapCaviar, if you’re in need of some soothing music.

If I haven’t said it to you recently, thanks so much for subscribing and letting me share my thoughts with you. I’m very grateful.

Hrishikesh