How the Hot Dog Found Its Bun (8 page)

With words like that, you can just picture the perfectly dressed Mrs. Wakefield (apron nicely tied), serving a batch of her most famous creation: the chocolate chip cookie. She was surely a product of her times—for example, she would insist that there were “
no substitutes
[her italics] for butter [and] cream.” But to put her in a box based on her writing isn’t fair. In actuality, Wakefield was a successful writer, dietitian, lecturer, and businesswoman. And, as the regularly retold story goes, besides inventing the chocolate chip cookie to overcome a cooking problem she faced in the kitchen, she also knew how to capitalize on her unplanned discovery.

In August 1930, Ruth and her husband, Kenneth, purchased a Cape Cod–style house on the outskirts of Whitman, Massachusetts. The building was loaded with history. Erected in 1709, it had been used as a toll house and rest stop on the road between New Bedford and Boston. Drawing from history, the Wakefields turned the cozy spot into an inn, which they called The Toll House.

Considering her mastery of the household arts, Ruth probably ran many of the day-to-day elements of the hotel, but she was without a doubt queen of the kitchen. First published in 1936, her cookbook
Ruth Wakefield’s Toll House Tried and True Recipes
went through some thirty-nine editions. It offers a spectrum of recipes for such tantalizing fare as onion soup, lobster thermidor, and chicken soufflé.

But it’s her Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookies that she became most known for. Amazingly this recipe, which calls for two bars of “Nestlé’s yellow label chocolate, semi-sweet, which has been cut in pieces the size of a pea” was the first ever to include chocolate chips. That’s saying a lot because cookies, which come from the Dutch word
koekje
(meaning “little cake”), have a history dating back to the seventh century and chocolate bars were invented in the mid-nineteenth century.

Why did Wakefield decide to change the destiny of the cookie? The vastly popular lore goes like this: In 1930 Wakefield was making butter cookies when she realized a key ingredient was missing (some say it was nuts, while others claim it was cooking chocolate). Either she didn’t have the time or the inclination to pop out for the missing materials so she broke up some Nestlé chocolate bars with an ice pick and used those pieces instead. Much to her surprise the combination was fantastic and she christened her find Chocolate Crispies. Another slightly simpler version states that Wakefield simply threw chocolate pieces into cookie dough on a whim, stumbling into pure cookie heaven.

Nestlé discovered Wakefield’s work when one of its salesmen began inquiring into why their chocolate bars were selling so well in Wakefield’s town of Whitman. In 1939, Wakefield negotiated a forty-year contract with the company. That year Nestlé started selling their chocolate in “morsel” form—or as we better know them, as chips. They also printed Wakefield’s recipe on the bag and renamed the confection Toll House Cookies.

Nestlé must have liked this tale because during the cookie’s fiftieth anniversary proceedings in 1980, the accidental discovery story was offered up (those stories were running in newspapers by at least 1955). That said, a
Christian Science Monitor
article that ran in 1977, the year Wakefield died, asserted that Wakefield may have been more deliberate in her efforts. According to journalist Phyllis Hanes, who reported from Whitman, Wakefield had remembered experiments from her college food chemistry classes and resolved to come up with a new treat as an alternative to her crisp pecan icebox cookies. After trial-and-error, she and her pastry cook, Sue Bridges, developed the perfect recipe. Wakefield’s own words seem to bolster this account. She once wrote, “Certainty in place of guessing eliminates failures.” This suggests she wasn’t one to haphazardly throw ingredients in a bowl and go for it.

If the
Monitor
’s story is accurate, Wakefield certainly showed a businesswoman’s smarts. It appears she never publicly contradicted the more fanciful yarn—a shrewd choice that likely sold more bags of chocolate chips for Nestlé.

Chocolate Molten Cake (Chocolate Lava Cake): Celebrity chef flub

Even celebrity chefs get it wrong sometimes.

French native Jean-Georges Vongerichten made a name for himself in the ever-competitive New York City cooking scene and went on to establish restaurants throughout the world, including spots in such far-flung locales as the Bahamas and Shanghai. Though some have criticized the chef for spreading himself a bit too thin over the years, he is beloved by many discerning food critics.

One once wrote that “as gracefully as any of his peers, Jean-Georges Vongerichten shows that today’s globe-trotting genre-straddling, hyperextended super chef can still create memorable—even riveting—meals.” Another critic called him a “legend . . . one of the most influential and creative chefs of our time. His food, which eschews thick butter and cream sauces for vegetable broths, fruit juices, and infused oils, is extolled as being ethereally light, clean, and simple.”

Yet back in 1987, he was a young chef with a lot on his mind. He was running the kitchen at the Restaurant Lafayette, located in Manhattan’s now-defunct Drake Hotel. One night Vongerichten was charged with putting together a private dinner for 300 guests. It was a tall task for a man who at the time hadn’t experienced the crush of cooking so many dishes for a group. This was particularly the case when it came to preparing a slew of the small chocolate cakes that were set for the evening’s menu.

“Baking one and baking 300 is different,” he told the
Chicago Tribune
in 2006. “They were supposed to be cooked through, but the oven temperature dropped. We miscalculated the timing.” The result was a cake that had a firm outer shell and a chocolate gooey center. Before he realized the miscue, the cakes were in the dining room. Vongerichten claimed that not only were people chowing down, but they were also “screaming wanting the recipe.”

He would go on to name the dish Valrhona cake with vanilla ice cream (Valrhona is the name of the chocolate he used in making the dessert). The rest of America embraced it as chocolate molten cake or chocolate lava cake (my family simply calls it “the ooze”). Others—particularly some French pastry chefs—have claimed to be the first, but Vongerichten brought celebrity to the dish. As Jacques Torres, a longtime pastry chef at iconic New York establishment Le Cirque, put it, “He was the first to make it in America, but it existed in France already.”

Interestingly, Vongerichten did not always tell such a colorful origin story. In 1991, just a few years after he introduced his creation, the chef told prominent
New York Times
food writer Florence Fabricant that he got the recipe for the cake from his mother. At the time a number of other ambitious chefs were trying to stake a claim to the cake’s provenance so maybe Vongerichten felt he needed a more ironclad story. As he got older, perhaps he felt more confident to disclose the truth behind the sweet dish. Whatever the case, the undercooked cake tale has become part of his lore and his dessert has developed into a staple at high-end dining spots as well as places that Jean-Georges might not approve of.

Cookies ’n Cream Ice Cream: Short work break

John Harrison may very well have the greatest job on the planet. As the official taste tester for Edy’s Grand Ice Cream, he spends all day making sure various flavors meet quality control standards. He even uses a gold spoon, as wood and plastic varieties leave an aftertaste and silver tends to tarnish. All told, he’s checked approximately 200 million gallons of the sweet delicacy—though his doctor would be happy to know that he doesn’t swallow any of the scoops he samples. As he puts it, he has a three-step process: “Swirl, smack, and spit . . . You’re going to get the appearance, you’re going to get the flavor, and you’re going to get the texture. And that’s what you’re looking for.” Along with tasting, Harrison, a fourth generation ice-cream man, also dabbles in creation, having developed more than seventy new flavors.

Yet his biggest discovery—Cookies ’n Cream—didn’t come from advanced testing, but from a need to snack quickly before getting back on the job. In 1982, while taking a break from the lab (yep, ice-cream tasters have a laboratory), he wanted a simple scoop of vanilla, which is Harrison’s favorite. He went to the company ice-cream parlor and alongside his bowl were a few chocolate cookies. Ironically, he didn’t have a lot of time to eat his ice cream because he needed to get back to tasting ice cream. To speed up the process, he broke up the cookies and tossed them in with his snack. Harrison, who reportedly has his nine thousand taste buds insured for one million dollars, immediately knew he was savoring something special.

“I was in a hurry,” said Harrison reflecting on the moment nearly two decades later in a 2001
Reading Eagle
article. “And I thought it would just be faster if I put the cookies into the ice cream. Cookies ’n Cream was invented by accident.”

As simple as the cookies-plus-vanilla-ice-cream-combo might seem, nobody had mass-produced the product. At least two others in the 1970s—a South Dakota State University dairy plant manager named Shirley W. Seas and Massachusetts ice-cream parlor owner Steve Herrell—have claimed to have been first with the idea. But nothing had hit the worldwide market until Harrison threw together the mixture.

Interestingly, it required an act of God for Edy’s to jump on the opportunity to sell the stuff. When Harrison went to his bosses with his new flavor, they originally weren’t too interested. They believed it was too much of a kids’ flavor and worried it wouldn’t have mass appeal. Luckily for Cookies ’n Cream lovers everywhere, the winter of 1982 didn’t treat peaches in the South very kindly. Huge hail storms decimated the crop, which left Edy’s in a dilemma. They’d planned on rolling out a Perfectly Peach flavor, but they weren’t going to have enough fruit to make it happen.

Harrison stepped up, going back into the file cabinet and suggesting that the company use his cookie-and-cream ice-cream concoction as a replacement. The company, which is also known as Dreyer’s in the western United States, agreed but did so reluctantly. In 1983 executives said they’d give the flavor ninety days and then reassess. Within no time, Cookies ’n Cream was a hit, becoming the fifth-highest selling flavor in the word—a lofty height that Perfectly Peach would have probably never reached.

Crêpes Suzette: Clumsy waiter

Henri Charpentier was a true bon vivant. A chef of the highest order, he worked at top-notch restaurants in Paris as well as the Savoy in London before being lured to the United States to run the kitchen at New York’s famed Delmonico’s. A storyteller with a knack for drama, he once declared he made four million dollars as a chef and restaurateur before losing it all. That would be an impressive feat for a man whose career primarily spanned the first half of the twentieth century.

Yet for all his success (and failure), Charpentier’s greatest claim to history occurred when he was a clumsy sixteen-year-old boy.

I would not do his tale justice, so I now hand it over to Charpentier, who explained just months before he died how he allegedly created crêpes Suzette in Monte Carlo in 1896:

I was only sixteen and serving the Prince of Wales, son of Queen Victoria, later King Edward VIII of England. Among the diners at the Prince’s table was a beautiful French girl named Suzette. I cannot recall her last name. It does not matter.

His highness ordered crêpes—the French pancakes. I mixed the sauce, and added a brandy blend of my own. As I did, the heat of the chafing dish accidentally set the simmering cordials afire.

I was embarrassed but I did not show it. I poured the fiery sauce on the crêpes, as if the flames were set on purpose. The prince tasted. Then he smiled and said: “Henri, what have you done with these crêpes? They are superb.”

I was thrilled and offered to name them in his honor. But he declined. “Henri,” he said, “we must always remember that the ladies come first. We will call this glorious thing crêpes Suzette.” That was the day, monsieur. People had been eating pancakes from the days of Napoleon—even the Romans—but never before that day crêpes Suzette.