Marguerite Gaquin, daughter of late Toll House baker Sue Brides, and I succumb to the charms of Boston TV host Maria Stephanos, up to and including Gaquin showing us her mother’s original recipe! As chapter one of my book explains, Brides was chief baker for cookie inventor and Toll House restaurant owner Ruth Wakefield and was at her side when Wakefield invented the chocolate chip cookie. See more photos and what Gaquin says is the real, original recipe at WCVB’s website.
Sadly, I spent Chocolate Chip Day 2014 at my dad’s wake but Kate Erbland picked up the slack with this Mental Floss meditation on the chocolate chip (duly crediting some of my historic findings). There are also book mentions in two recent Dede Wilson pieces (one in the Boston Globe and this other one on her Bakepedia website) exploring her obsession with making Toll House cookies the way Ruth Wakefield intended.
Good friend Valerie Richardson and I discussed Ruth Wakefield, good chocolate chip cookies in New Haven, CT (especially the greasy, cheap and delicious ones at the Educated
Burgher), and my all-chocolate-chip birthday party on her Radio Something show on listener-supported WPKN-Bridgeport radio last Tuesday — podcast here, should you want to catch up. Check out some of multitalented Val’s intriguing still-life-produce-with-skeleton artwork here.
On Thursday, my essay about the real story behind the invention of the chocolate chip cookie (i.e. it was no accident) posted on Slate’s Food page. Eater posted links to it, The Daily Mail in the U.K. wrote this story off it and the story itself has been reprinted in a number of newspapers around this country.
Not home from Boston two days before Buzzfeed posted my 19 Surprising Facts About Chocolate Chip Cookies list to its Food and Home pages. By Wednesday I was a Top 20 Buzzfeed contributor, the list had gone viral on feedly.com and I had won the Golden Facebook Award (for 10,000 shares therein, despite my not even being on Facebook). Today it is 200,000 views and counting!
This chocolate chip cookie book writer rests on the expertise of all the chocolate chip cookie book writers who have gone before. That includes A Baker’s Field Guide to Chocolate Chip Cookies author Dede Wilson, whose neat Half and Half Chocolate Chip Cookies are highlighted in the p. 169 “Cookie Artist” sidebar of The Great American Chocolate Chip 
Cookie Book. Dede was nice enough to interview me on her Bakepedia website and also reproduced one of my personal favorite chocolate chip cookie recipes in my book (an award-winner from the late, great California Copia culinary center). Bakepedia’s other chocolate chip cookie attractions include contributor Lauren Chattman’s story testing whether it’s worth resting cookie dough on the refrigerator (Spoiler: It is, especially if you can wait for 36 hours) and recipes for one-bowl and giant chocolate chip cookies.
Internet radio host Linda Pelaccio and I had this fun half-hour chat about chocolate chip cookies (and Spam!) recently. My ex-Supermarket Sampler column partner Bonnie Tandy Leblang provided the link to Linda and her A Taste of the Past‘s radio show on the nonprofit Heritage Radio Network (neither of which I had heard of before) and now I’m working to catch up on A Taste of the Past’s archived shows about the history of candy, pizza, refrigeration and supermarkets (among other things). The guy who started Slow Food USA is also behind Heritage and both are well-worth your time/$!
New Yorker culture blogger Jon Michaud gave me an early Christmas gift in the form of the extensive chocolate chip cookie history and think piece based on (and credited to) my book. His “Sweet Morsels: A History of the Chocolate Chip Cookie” was one of the most popular and most emailed stories on NewYorker.com for way longer than Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes and got links on the Huffington Post, eater.com, eatyourbooks.com and the Houston Press, to name a few, and tweets/retweets (from NPR’s Julie Rovner, risking her health policy cred, among others). Talk about a gift that keeps on giving! Happy holidays!
GACCCB was one of Cape Cod Times book editor Melanie Lauwers’ picks for a great book gift on “The Point with Mindy Todd” on Cape Cod NPR station WCAI, during a show devoted to holiday-themed, cooking and craft books, which you can listen to here. Lauwers called GACCB “adorable,” though the information that I had also written a whole book about Spam elicited an “oh, dear,” from host Todd. (Lauwers’ review of the book for her newspaper read, in part, “The history, the popular culture and the cultural variations of chocolate chip cookies … mixed .. into one colorful and informative book.”)
Another Point, the great, new, independent Main Point Books in Bryn Mawr, hosted a local cookbook author signing event Dec. 15, including me and, coincidentally, Cookulus chocolate chip cookie app inventor Andrew Schloss (featured on p. 166 of my book), serving up drinks from his new Homemade Liqueurs and Infused Spirits book. The nearby Hope’s Cookies generously supplied refreshments for book-buyers like me, who prefer a sugar high.
An adaptation of Metropolitan Bakery‘s Salted Chocolate Chip and Sour Cherry Cookie recipe that appears in the book was one of 25 recipes featured in the Washington Post Food pages’ annual holiday cookie issue this week. That section also contains a story (supplemented online by this video) by Post columnist Stephanie Witt Sedgwick suggesting ways to make your chocolate chip cookies stand out on a holiday buffet table. Since she likes the basic Nestle Toll House recipe, her ideas mostly focused on varying the size of both the cookies and the chocolate chips you use.
My wide-ranging chat with Hadas Kuznits about the book and the chocolate chip cookie’s invention aired on Philadelphia news radio KYW-AM’s “What’s Cooking” show this weekend.