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.
The perfect gift for the chocolate chip cookie lover in your life: a copy of The Great American Chocolate Chip Cookie Book personally inscribed by the author to your recipient paired with a tin of the real thing (or not!).
No doubt you’ve heard the saying, “Feed someone a fish and you feed them for a day; teach them how to fish and you feed them for a lifetime.” It is equally true of chocolate chip cookies and a book that offers great recipes and tips for a lifetime of great chocolate chip cookie baking and eating!
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!
Ended Chocolate Chip Cookie Week 2014 by delivering a Powerpoint at the Boston Public Library, located just about 20 miles from where the cookie was invented. During the Q&A that followed, I learned of some Jordan Marsh department store chocolate chip cookies that at least one woman in the audience missed as much as their famous blueberry muffins. After that everyone rushed to the back of the room for some delicious cookies from talk partner bakery Kilvert & Forbes (featured on pages 98 and 100 of the book). Visit the contact page to inquire about having me deliver this talk to your company or group!
I talk about Gov. Weld’s love of the Fig Newton.
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!