Ultimate Chocolate Cookie Book - Bruce Weinstein [1]
For our purposes, it’s a strange and wonderful coincidence that a Dutchman came up with the first truly usable and palatable chocolate. The Dutch, of course, are purported also to be the inventors of cookies. The very word “cookie” most likely comes from a Dutch word, kookje, or “small cake”—or (more accurately) “test cake,” for a kookje was that bit of batter thrown onto the floor of an oven to test the heat. If the batter just sat there, the oven needed more time to heat up; if the kookje burned at the edges, the oven needed time to cool down. So we have the chocolate and we have the cookies in one country—but we don’t yet have a chocolate cookie. That divine combination still had to wait.
Van Houten’s cocoa-making process had an unwitting by-product: cocoa butter and lots of it. Manufacturers now had an excess which they could sell (many still do) to the cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries. But surely there was something one could do on a culinary front with that luscious left-over.
Pump it back into chocolate, of course. And that idea arose in a country that practically invented the sweet tooth: Great Britain. Less than twenty years after Van Houten applied for his patent, an enterprising Quaker businessman, Joseph Storrs Fry, already the owner of a small chocolate concern, discovered that he could mix sugar and cocoa solids with melted cocoa butter and create a thick, luscious mixture that could be molded and hardened—in other words, the world’s first chocolate bar.
But baking with chocolate still proved an elusive notion. Sure, people had cooked with chocolate before. The Marquis de Sade, trapped in the Bastille, sent endless letters to his wife, imploring her to have their personal chef send chocolate cakes while he waited for his trial. But these concoctions were rarities, not the norm. Chocolate was a drink—period. An aristocratic, elitist drink. Any use of it in ordinary baking would cross well-established boundaries. (Heaven forfend, that’s what de Sade did!) It would take the thinking of someone who didn’t follow the rules. The kind of thinking Americans excel at.
The first breakthrough happened in 1912. The National Biscuit Company (aka Nabisco), looking for a follow-up hit to Barnum’s Animal Crackers, introduced two chocolate disks sandwiching a cream filling: the Oreo, the first chocolate cookie craze. Lines were said to form at markets well before dawn as people waited for the next shipment of what has since become the best-selling chocolate cookie ever, with more than 7.5 billion sold each year.
But the real conflagration for home bakers came in 1930 when Ruth Wakefield made culinary history with the first chocolate chip cookie. One afternoon at the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts, Wakefield cut up a chocolate bar, dropped it in her butter cookies, and invented an icon. But this was no happy accident. Wakefield was an entrepreneur who ran one of the most successful tourist businesses on the East Coast; she was also a trained nutritionist. Nestlé had sent her bars of chocolate because the company was looking for a new sensation, something that would market their product to new heights. Ruth willingly obliged. And the rest? As they say, it’s history.
It’s a short hop from Oreo and Tollhouse cookies to a book like this, dedicated to the chocolate cookie in all its forms, whether made with cocoa powder or melted chocolate. We hope these are recipes you can come back to time and again—loads of chocolate chip cookies (believe it or not, the Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies are our favorite), lots of sandwich cookies, some down-home treats like Chocolate Marshmallow Cookies (our version of Mallomars), and even a few foofy treats like Chocolate Tuiles. Soon, you’ll be doing your