All I know is that my mom made the best Toll House (er; Chocolate Chip) cookies on the planet. If anybody says otherwise, I will fight you to the death.
Toll house cookies were my mother’s favorite, and she made them very often, from scratch. They contained chocolate chips and nuts, usually pieces of walnuts. If she made them without nuts, they weren’t toll house, they were chocolate chip.
Never heard of it: that’s what.
Wow! I was expecting maybe four or five replies. I should have remembered: Dopers and food.
Anyway, the reason I was asking was that I’ve always thought of Toll House cookies as a specific recipe, the one from the bag of Toll House morsels. Anything else is a chocolate chip cookie. So I made chocolate chip cookies for the County Fair. I entered them in the class labeled “Cookies, Any Other Kind” because, much to my surprise, there was no class for chocolate chip cookies. There was one for chocolate drop cookies, but not chocolate chip. However, there was a class for “Toll House Cookies”. I guess I should have asked, but I thought maybe they wanted them all made the same way, so they would be easier to judge, and since that’s such a well-known recipe, it made some kind of sense to me that it would be a class by itself.
Well, lo and behold, to the Fair judges it just means “chocolate chip cookie”. They put mine into that class with the rest. I’m not really upset about it, because I did get a red ribbon on them, but it irks me a bit. If I’d known that’s how it was I probably would have entered a different kind of cookie. Maybe Peanut Blossoms next year!
But it made me wonder how common it was, if at all, for toll house to be used to mean just any chocolate chip cookie. So, thank you for satisfying my curiosity a little. If I could, I’d send you each a cookie. Sorry I made any of you hungry.
(And sometimes I’d like to live in Inigo’s world, too. Interesting image, that.)
I really like that idea. But by Christmas I’ll probably have forgotten it.
** If I say Toll House cookies, what do you think? **
Chocolate chip cookies made using that specific recipe (Nestle’s). Not choc. chip cookies in general.
I think it has become, as you discovered, a generic term in some regions of the country. Just as people in the south say they want a coke when they mean any kind of carbonated beverage, Toll House cookie implies a cookie that contains chocolate chips and probably nuts. The different recipes for the basic dough aren’t really that wildly different from each other…subtle changes, not grand leaps.
Unless you add mint and green food color!
Now I’m really regretting never making up the freezer version so I could pop a few in the oven…or not having baked up a bunch and frozen them…oooh, frozen chocolate chip cookies! Yum!
Now I want cookies. But more specifically, I want cookie dough. A big bowl piled high with Nestle’s Toll House Cookie dough (made with egg substitutes to avoid salmonella).
Mmm…cookie dough…
to the OP, “Toll House” is the recipe on the back of a Nestle Chocolate Chip package, and the default standard for chocolate chip cookies. This is because that is the first ever chocolate chip recipe. Darn good, too.
My normal chocolate chip recipe is an oatmeal-and-coconut concoction my mother got from my childhood friend’s mother. It’s a crapload of work, but always gets rave reviews.
I think it’s the specific recipe.
I also think it’s a sign that I need to bake - I now have a batch of biscuits in the oven, and fresh date scones on the counter. Damn you.
I think the TH recipe uses way too many chips, so I cut them in half. Don’t underestimate the cookie.
I think of their yellow packaging for the dough. Yellow is a really effective color for packaging.
I think of a line from Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint” where he’s constantly masturbating and one of his fantasies is about a black woman who has large breasts with areolas the size toll house cookies. That image kind of pushed the cookie association out of the way forever.
I think of them as very brand specific. I don’t think they will ever become generalized like Xerox or Legos. They also make me think of the episode of Friends with Phoebe’s secret family recipe.
I usually bake the first panful before I put in the chips, because my youngest, and sometimes I, like them better that way. We call them chocolate chipless. Of course, that leaves more chips in the rest of the batch, but the rest of the family hasn’t complained.
My mom used to double the batch and still use just one bag of chips. Not because the recipe called for too many chips, but because it was cheaper that way.
Hmmm, now that I think about it, maybe there’s a correlation there? Probably not, really. My cookies are good.
Sorry. Date scones sound delicious, though. Would you mind sharing the recipe?
We did the same thing in my family. 
I still want cooooookie.
I call them Chocolate Chip Surprise cookies. Of course, the surprise is, there are no chips.
Not a big fan of coconut, but I would sure appreciate some chocolate chip oatmeal cookies. We used to follow the recipe on a Quaker Oats carton and dump in a bag of Nestlés chocolate chips. I find the taste and texture of sugar cookie dough bland and uninteresting by comparison. Not that I’d actually turn down a chocolate chip cookie, mind you.
Whereas I tend to not like things in my cookies, brownies, etc. Chocolate chips are fine, but for some reason I don’t like nuts in things. I like nuts, but not in cookies, brownies, sweet potatoes, etc. I think it’s a texture thing.
And coconut blows.