National Chocolate Chip Day

National Chocolate Chip Day, observed on May 15th, celebrates the small chocolate morsel that transformed American baking after its accidental invention by Ruth Wakefield, owner of the Toll House Inn in Massachusetts, in the 1930s. According to the popular account, Wakefield was making a batch of butter drop cookies when she ran out of baker's chocolate and substituted broken pieces of a semi-sweet chocolate bar, expecting the chocolate to melt smoothly into the dough, but instead the chunks largely held their shape, creating the now-iconic combination of soft cookie dough studded with pockets of melted chocolate. The resulting Toll House cookie became enormously popular, and Wakefield eventually struck a deal with Nestlé, allowing the company to print her recipe on its chocolate bar packaging in exchange for a lifetime supply of chocolate, before Nestlé later began producing pre-cut chocolate morsels specifically designed for baking, eliminating the need to chop a chocolate bar by hand. Chocolate chip cookies subsequently became the best-selling cookie variety in the United States, and chocolate chips themselves expanded well beyond cookie baking into countless other applications, including pancakes, muffins, banana bread, trail mix, and ice cream. On this day, bakers celebrate by making a fresh batch of chocolate chip cookies or incorporating chocolate chips into other favorite recipes.