Ruth Wakefield

INVENTOR of chocolate chip cookies
Dietician and food lecturer who owned an inn near Boston, MA called the Toll House, which became popular because of her cooking and desserts
Legend has it that she was in the middle of making cookies when she realized she was out of baker's chocolate, so she broke up a bar of semi-sweet chocolate, thinking it would be absorbed into the dough. When the cookies came out with the morsels still intact, she realized she'd stumbled across a new kind of cookie.
Sources vary on whether this is what actually happened, or just a cute story that was used to market the new confection; either way, she was definitely the FIRST one to come up with the idea
Sold the Toll House name and the rights to her recipe to Nestle, and continued working for them as a consultant for several years

Bibliography: Maggs, Sam. Wonder Women: 25 Innovators, Inventors, and Trailblazers Who Changed History. Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2016. Print.

Books by this Awesome Woman

Biographies for Kids and Young Adults

How the Cookie Crumbled: The True (and Not-So-True) Stories of the Invention of the Chocolate Chip Cookie

(picture book)

The Chocolate Chip Cookie Queen: Ruth Wakefield and Her Yummy Invention

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