The cookie behind National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day is the one nobody has to explain. Put a batch in the oven this evening, and eat the first one while the chocolate is still soft.
A 2021 notice from Prince William County, Virginia, marks the day on August 4 and states that no one knows how the date was chosen. The name returns no document in the Federal Register, and it appears in none of the Chase's Calendar of Events volumes that HathiTrust indexes.
National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day comes attached to a story about luck. Ruth Graves Wakefield, the version goes, ran out of baker's chocolate at her Massachusetts inn, chopped up a Nestlé bar instead, and expected the pieces to melt. They did not, and a new cookie existed.
Wakefield told it differently. "We had been serving a thin butterscotch nut cookie with ice cream," she said in a 1970s interview. "Everybody seemed to love it, but I was trying to give them something different."
A federal judge writing about the cookie in 1983 introduced the accident version with three careful words. According to legend, the opinion says, before repeating it. The record behind the cookie runs to court files, dictionaries and a one-sentence state law.
DEALS & OFFERS
National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day ran on August 4. Here’s who celebrated with offers this year.
Ruth Graves Wakefield came to innkeeping as a trained professional. She took a household arts degree from the Framingham State Normal School in 1924, then taught home economics at Brockton High School and worked as a hospital dietitian. In 1930 she and her husband Kenneth bought a house in Whitman, Massachusetts, and opened the Toll House Inn.
Her recipes went into a cookbook. The chocolate cookie reached print in the 1938 edition, under the name it was given first: Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookies.
The cookies caught on around Whitman, and so did the ingredient. Sales of the Nestlé bar rose, and Carolyn Wyman, who wrote a book about the cookie, says the company sent a salesman out to find Wakefield.
Beginning in 1939 the Wakefields signed a series of agreements handing Nestlé's predecessor, Lamont, Corliss and Company, exclusive rights to the Toll House name for chocolate and food products. By 1948 the arrangement had gone far enough that Lamont, Corliss had to give the Wakefields permission to put Toll House on a cookie.
What Wakefield got in return is not on the record. Wyman found that nobody involved, Wakefield's daughter included, would say what the agreement contained. The New York Times reports the popular version, one dollar and a lifetime of free chocolate, with a supposedly in front of it.
In May 1982 Nestlé sued Chester's Market and Saccone's Toll House over their use of the name on cookies. The defendants ran no consumer surveys of their own. They did not need to.
The research that sank the trademark came out of Nestlé's own files, handed over in discovery. On 23 August 1983 the district court held that Toll House, as applied to cookies, had become generic, and it cancelled the registration.
Wakefield's New York Times obituary ends the story there. While the appeal was pending the parties settled, and on 5 March 1985 the Second Circuit sent the case back with instructions to vacate the judgment and dismiss the claims.
No record has been found of who put National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day on August 4. The Toll House Inn is gone too. It burned in 1984, and a historical marker is its only remnant.
TIMELINE
Nowadays, people love the 'dumb luck' story of the person who wins the lottery, or invents something because they were doing something else. But what she did was still revolutionary.
Nestle is the victim of its own phenomenal success in selling chocolate morsels as an ingredient in homemade Toll House cookies while failing to market packaged Toll House cookies in any significant numbers.
No founder has been identified for the day. A 2021 notice from Prince William County, Virginia, marking August 4 puts it the same way: no one knows exactly how the date became National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day.
COLOPHON
Celebrate Bake Cookies Day with your family and friends - whip up a batch of delicious cookies for everyone to enjoy!
National Cookie Month has the whole of October, which is a generous run for something that rarely lasts an afternoon. Bake a batch and hand most of it around while it is still warm.
National Homemade Cookies Day marks the cookies that come out of somebody's own kitchen rather than a wrapper. Choose a recipe simple enough to make from memory, and bake enough to hand some over the fence.
