Toll House Cookies and me

 

I can smell chocolate chip cookies just looking at this jar.  It was always visible in the kitchen when we were growing up. I wonder if it was a wedding present to my parents.

Toll House is the only kind of cookie I remember being in it.

This is not a particularly large cookie jar, but then it used to be that a batch of cookies was smaller than we think of today.  A bag of chocolate chips was only 6 ounces.

Cookies - especially chocolate chip ones - seem to be a recurring theme.

I first made cookies by myself when we lived in Ohio in fourth grade.  I particularly remember measuring out six tablespoons of brown sugar.  Since brown sugar holds it shape, I could make it look as if there were half a dozen small brown eggs in the bowl  (hey, I was 9).

The summer after that, back in Delaware, I made a lot of toll house cookies and sold them door to door in the neighborhood.

Fifteen cents for a quarter of a pound.  I think that some relatives must have bought some, too.  There was an option to buy a whole tin full for $3.  I really do not remember what the arrangement was for buying ingredients, but I don't think they just magically appeared.

In any case, at the end of the summer I bought a Brownie flash camera with the proceeds.

And yes, I still have the camera, though I don't know if it still works.  127 film.

I took at least one tin of Toll House cookies to Dr. and Mrs.Webber in the summer after 10th grade, when I audited a pre-calculus class Dr. Webber was teaching at the University of Delaware. It was a course designed to help incoming freshmen, and I aced it with a lot of maternal coaching on the trig parts.  Dr. Webber was just amused to have me in class since he had been Mother's advisor on her Masters Dissertation and thought very highly of her. I'm sure Mother asked him to let me sit in on the course to provide me with something productive to do with my summer.  

There were 18 year old boys in that class, too, but that is another story.

Toll House cookies also were provided to the Tower Hill Summer School faculty lounge in 1963, or whatever year it was that I took a small but arduous course in score reading and conducting from Mr.B.  I was no good at all at transposition, and only adequate at conducting.   The cookies, however, were well received.

At some point - after Deluxe, I think -  I started baking cookies to take to work.
Target(IBM), MSI, and a couple of customer offices all benefited(?) from my signature cookie*, plus experiments with other chip/fruit combinations.

*oatmeal chocolate chip with dried cherries.