You may not realize this, but today is National Chocolate Chip Day, who would have known?!
An entire day set aside for America’s favorite cookie. No one has been able to discover any congressional records or presidential proclamations for the occassion, but the chocolate chip cookie is certainly deserving of the accolades.The marvelous, melt-in-your-mouth treats haven’t been around all that long. According to wikipedia.com the stories goes like this…
The chocolate chip cookie was accidentally developed by Ruth Graves Wakefield in 1930. She owned the Toll House Inn, in Whitman, Massachusetts, a very popular restaurant that featured home cooking in the 1930s. The restaurant’s popularity was not just due to its home-cooked style meals; her policy was to give diners a whole extra helping of their entrées to take home with them and a serving of her homemade cookies for dessert. Her cookbook, Toll House Tried and True Recipes,
was published in 1936 by M. Barrows & Company, New York. It included the recipe “Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookie”, which rapidly became a favorite to be baked in American homes (that included the Holm family, this is by far our mother’s FAVORITE cookie of all times, she was 7 at the time of publication, no wonder!).
When googling “chocolate chip cookie recipe” you discover 1,300,000 pages dedicated to the chocolate treasure, that’s a lot o’ chocolate chips!! Some of the mainstays that popped up were Betty Crocker’s “Ultimate” Chocolate Chip Cookie, Sunset Magazine’s “Perfect” Chocolate Chip Cookie, Hershey’s also had the “perfect” cookie (how’s a woman to choose??). Of course Martha Stewart has a recipe, “soft and chewy” as she brings up the age old question, “thin and crispy or soft and chewy?” Land O’ Lakes Butter touts a gluten free recipe, and just to cover our bases, and there is no shortage of vegan chocolate chip cookie recipes, 344,000 vegan chocolate chip recipes can be found on google, and supervegan.com had “The best vegan chocolate chip cookie ever. Serious.” And then we really need to remember the source, Nestle Toll House, the original recipe. But when it comes right down to it, we stick with our Granny’s recipe, found in The Holm Family Cookbook!!
Granny’s Chocolate Chip Cookies
Ione Teeter Holm
Makes 4 dozen cookies
- 1 cup vegetable shortening (Crisco), plus more to oil the pans
- 3/4 cup granulated sugar
- 3/4 cup firmly-packed brown sugar
- 2 eggs
- 1/2 teaspoon water
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 21/4 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 cup chopped walnuts
- 1 (12-ounce) package chocolate chips
Preheat the oven to 375˚F and oil (or spray) several cookie sheets. In a bowl, cream together the shortening and both sugars. Add the eggs, water, and vanilla and mix until well blended. In another bowl, combine the flour, baking soda, and salt. Add the dry ingredients to the creamed shortening mixture and mix thoroughly. Add the nuts and chocolate chips and mix again. Drop spoonfuls of the dough onto a cookie sheet and bake for 12 minutes or until light brown.
Happy Baking!! Nancy