Ruth Graves Wakefield Cookbook Collection

The Wakefield Cookbook Collection is comprised of the donor's personal library of books on cooking, domestic science, etiquette, and other household topics.

Ruth Graves graduated from the Framingham State Normal School Department of Household Arts in 1924. After graduation, she worked as a dietitian and food lecturer. In 1930, she published a cookbook entitled Ruth Wakefield's Recipes: Tried and True. The book went through thirty-nine printings.

The most famous of her original recipes was the Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookie, named for the restaurant that she and her husband Ken Wakefield owned, the Toll House Inn. Better known as the chocolate chip cookie, Ruth Wakefield developed this recipe in 1933 by breaking up a Nestle semi-sweet chocolate bar and adding it to a basic brown sugar cookie dough.

In the years that followed, the Wakefields enjoyed a pleasant relationship with the Nestle Company, which eventually featured the cookie recipe on the wrapper of its semi-sweet candy bar. When Nestle began the production of chocolate morsels, the recipe, too, was printed on the back of each package where it remains to this day.

Ruth's interest in seeking new and innovative recipes to serve at the couple's restaurant led her to amass a collection of cookbooks. In 1969, two years after the Wakefields sold the Toll House Inn, Ruth Graves Wakefield donated her cookbooks to the Special Collections.