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Happy National Chocolate Chip Day!

Here are today’s five food finds about Chocolate Chips:

 

  • Originally, chocolate chips were made of semi-sweet chocolate.

 

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  • Chocolate chips were invented in 1933 when Ruth Graves Wakefield of the Toll House Inn in the town of Whitman, Massachusetts added cut-up chunks of a semi-sweet Nestlé chocolate bar to a cookie recipe.

 

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  • The cookies were a huge success, and Wakefield reached an agreement with Nestlé to add her recipe to the chocolate bar’s packaging in exchange for a lifetime supply of chocolate.
  • Initially, Nestlé included a small chopping tool with the chocolate bars, but in 1939 they started selling the chocolate in chip (or “morsel”) form.

 

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  • The Nestlé brand Toll House cookies is named for the inn.

 

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Today’s Food History

on this day in…

  • 1923 Listerine was registered as a trademark.
  • 1930 Mrs. Ellen Church, a registered nurse, became the world’s first airline stewardess (flight attendant). The 11 passengers were flying on a United Airlines tri-motor Boeing 80A from San Francisco to Cheyenne, Wyoming. The meal was chicken, fruit salad and rolls.
  • 1940 Nylon stockings went on sale for the first time in the U.S. in Wilmington, Delaware.
  • 1989 Hershey’s reduces the size of the Hershey bar to 1.55 ounces. The price remains 40 cents.
  • 1991 The famous Paris cooking school, L’Ecole de Cordon Bleu, opens a branch in Tokyo, Japan.
  • 2007 Karen Hess, culinary historian, died. Some of her books were ‘The Taste of America‘ (1977) and ‘Carolina Rice Kitchen: The African Connection‘ (1992). She also annotated Mary Randolph’s ‘Virginia Housewife‘ (1983).