AllTop Viral!

If you’ve fallen prey to Winter Storm Hercules, the one thing you might be longing for (other than Florida or Phoenix) is comfort food, and nothing is more comforting than a chocolate chip cookie straight out of the oven.

Nothing will motivate you to brave the storm for ingredients like the history of this all American dessert by Jon Michaud in The New Yorker, and if you walk, you won’t even have to sweat the calories.

Here’s a bite:

Wakefield’s cookie was the perfect antidote to the Great Depression. In a single inexpensive hand-held serving, it contained the very richness and comfort that millions of people were forced to live without in the late nineteen-thirties. Ingesting a warm chocolate-chip cookie offered the eaters a brief respite from their quotidian woe. America’s entry into the Second World War only enhanced the popularity of Wakefield’s creation. Toll House cookies were a common constituent in care packages shipped to American soldiers overseas. Though chocolate was in short supply domestically because of the war effort, women on the home front were encouraged to use what little they had to bake cookies for “that soldier boy of yours,” as one Nestlé ad put it. The Toll House restaurant’s gift shop alone sent thousands of cookies to uniformed servicemen abroad. “Like Spam and Coca-Cola,” Wyman writes, “chocolate chip cookies’ fame was boosted by wartime soldier consumption. Before the war they were a largely East Coast-based fad; after Toll House cookies rivaled apple pie as the most popular dessert recipe in the country.”

Full story at The New Yorker via Kottke.

Baking at its best and most basic.

Photo credit: Fotolia