The Official State Cookie Of Massachusetts Is The Chocolate Chip Cookie
It may come as no surprise that the official state dessert of Massachusetts is the Boston cream pie, the official state fruit is the cranberry, and the official state donut is the Boston cream donut. But can you take a guess as to the official state cookie? If you said “chocolate chip cookie,” you are correct! Let’s take a look at how the best cookie ever created came to be the official cookie of Massachusetts.
It all started at The Toll House Inn & Restaurant, which was established by Kenneth Wakefield and Ruth Graves Wakefield in 1930. Along with the inn, the new innkeepers also created a restaurant on site.
Ruth Graves Wakefield developed the Toll House cookie recipe in the 1930s. She broke a bar of semi-sweet Nestle chocolate into some cookie dough and her experiment was a great success!
Word of Ruth's magical cookies spread far and wide and she eventually gave Nestle the rights to her cookie recipes for $1 and a lifetime supply of Nestle chocolate. Nestle then started to print her recipe on the wrappers of their chocolate bars and chocolate bits.
A favorite cookie of many, a third grade class from Somerset petitioned the state for the chocolate chip cookie to become the official state cookie. The state agreed and signed it into law on July 9, 1997. And the rest is history!
And what goes better with chocolate chip cookies than a glass of milk, regular or non-dairy? Dunking a Toll House chocolate chip cookies into a glass of milk is one of the great joys of life!
As for the Toll House Inn, today, you won't find much more than a sign and a commemorative plaque near the site. It was destroyed by a kitchen fire in 1984. But its legacy lives on in the cookie recipe many of us still use at home in our own kitchens to this day.
I'm an east coast girl living in a west coast world. I've worked in the entertainment industry for much of my adult life and I love photography, writing, and traveling around the U.S. as well as to far-flung locations around the world! Travel is my life and writing about it is a dream.
