In 1930, Ruth Graves Wakefield and her husband Kenneth bought an old toll house in Whitman, Massachusetts, and opened the Toll House Inn. Ruth was a trained dietitian and a serious cook, and her desserts were the reason people made the drive.
Around 1938 she chopped a bar of semi-sweet chocolate into her butter cookie dough. You've probably heard it was an accident. She said otherwise: she was trying to give her guests “something different.” Nestlé printed her recipe and started selling chocolate morsels, and in 1997 the chocolate chip cookie became the official cookie of Massachusetts.
We bake about 32 miles from Whitman, so we take that seriously. Three chocolates, three acts. Boston was making chocolate early, too: Baker's Chocolate began in Dorchester in 1765.
“it wasn’t an accident. neither is this.”
The filling is made the day before, the dough rests overnight, and every cookie is filled and closed by hand. Then it's baked the morning you pick it up. No preservatives, because it was never meant to sit on a shelf.