A good chocolate chip cookie is a thing of quiet beauty. In a world of stunt desserts layered with fondant, edible gold, cotton candy and glitter, it's regarded as an understated classic. This is despite the chocolate chip cookie being a relatively recent addition to the canon of global sweets. Where, for instance, the first recipe for the iconic French madeleine cookie was published in 1758, the chocolate chip cookie was invented nearly two centuries later by Ruth Graves Wakefield in 1938.
Wakefield, the owner of the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Mass., was looking for a way to innovate the thin cookies she served alongside ice cream. "We had been serving a thin butterscotch nut cookie with ice cream," Wakefield told reporters in the 1970s. "Everybody seemed to love it, but I was trying to give them something different."
