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By Root 1162 0

of Nestlé’s Semi-Sweet Toll House Morsels (either the Original Toll House Cookie recipe bought in the 1930s from Ruth Wakefield of the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts, or the slightly altered post-1970 version, which Nestlé also calls the Original) has made all other recipes for chocolate-chip cookies superfluous. Everybody fiddles with the Original, but my wife’s fiddling is, quite frankly, the best, producing thin and crisp yet chewy treats. I have recently received permission to reprint her formula. Only the quantities have been changed.

1 extra-large egg

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1⅔ cups all-purpose flour (measured by the scoop-and-level method)

1 teaspoon (scant) baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

1½ cups (3 sticks) softened butter

⅔ cup white granulated sugar

¾ cup firmly packed light brown sugar

¼ cup firmly packed dark brown sugar

2 cups (12-ounce package) chocolate chips

1 cup coarsely chopped walnuts

To make the cookies, follow the mixing and baking instructions on the back of the Nestlé’s Semi-Sweet Toll House Morsel bag.

I cannot say that our paradise was without its serpents. Quaker’s Prize-Winning Meat Loaf, which predictably substitutes Quaker oats for the usual bread or cracker crumbs, may have won a prize somewhere for oat cookery, but it does not compare with either of our mothers’ meat loaves or hypermodern variations like Paul Prudhomme’s Cajun recipe in Louisiana Kitchen (Morrow). The aggressively dull flavor of the oats becomes distasteful after a few bites. And Quaker’s makes you chop a quarter cup of your own onions, which to my mind violates the spirit of convenience cuisine. I was still feeling phobic about intricate knife work.

Campbell’s Green Bean Bake is, with the probable exception of Nestlé’s Toll House Cookies, the most popular back-of-the-box recipe ever created. You microwave up some frozen green beans and mix them in a casserole with a can of Campbell’s condensed cream of mushroom soup, milk, soy sauce, pepper, and half a three-and-a-half-ounce can of French-fried onion rings. Bake for twenty-five minutes, top with the remaining onion rings, and bake for five minutes more, whereupon the onions become golden and crispy.

My wife cannot abide the infinite-shelf-life flavor of canned soup, but the onion rings alone redeem Campbell’s Green Bean Bake for me. Therein lies the problem. The only national brand of canned French-fried onion rings is Durkee, and sometime after Campbell invented the recipe, Durkee went and downsized its can to 2.8 ounces, a full 20 percent shrinkage. I suppose there is nothing that Campbell can do about corporate policy at Durkee, but I resented having to buy two cans of Durkee’s and waste most of the second. To my taste, 2.8 ounces of canned French-fried onion rings is simply not enough for a proper Green Bean Bake. Three and a half ounces is perfect.

I telephoned Campbell headquarters to complain. Its exemplary spokesman Kevin Lowery quickly mesmerized me with details of the company’s side-of-the-can recipe ventures. Every evening in America, one million cans of Campbell’s soup are used as an ingredient in dinner, about a third of all the soup they sell. Thursday night is the most popular. Cream of mushroom, introduced in 1934, is still the clear winner. America buys 325 million cans of it every year, 80 percent as a sauce or flavoring in quick main courses and side dishes. Three of the five top-selling supermarket foods are Campbell’s soups. Can you guess the other two?*

Six years ago the company published Campbell’s Creative Cooking with Soup. It has sold two million copies (making it one of the most popular cookbooks of all time) and contains nineteen thousand recipes, each tested three times. Marcella Hazan once told me that Italian cuisine encompasses sixty thousand recipes. How much more rich and abundant is American cookery with its nineteen thousand ways to use condensed soup alone! That’s a different recipe every day of the year for fifty-two years, far longer than the life span of the average marriage. And I haven’t even told you