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Legend has it that Wakefield was trying a variation on a butterscotch dessert when she decided to let the chocolate chips fall where they may.

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Ruth Wakefield, inventor of the chocolate chip cookie, in the 1930s. Her confection was originally known as the Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookie, after the popular restaurant that she ran with her husband in Massachusetts. Credit Interfoto/Alamy

Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. With Overlooked, we're adding the stories of remarkable people.

Around the time Ruth Wakefield began making a chocolate chip cookie in the 1930s, naming newly invented treats after something or someone was in vogue.

Case in point: the Baby Ruth chocolate-covered nutty nougat bar, purportedly named for Grover Cleveland's daughter. Wakefield's confection was known originally as the Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookie, after the Toll House Inn, a popular restaurant that she ran with her husband in eastern Massachusetts.

Legend had it that she was brainstorming about cookie dough while returning from a vacation in Egypt when she first came up with the recipe, a variation on another popular treat called Butter Drop Do pecan icebox cookies.

"We had been serving a thin butterscotch nut cookie with ice cream," Wakefield recalled in a 1970s interview. "Everybody seemed to love it, but I was trying to give them something different."

Her original plan was said to have involved melting squares of Baker's chocolate (unsweetened, with no milk or flavoring) and adding it to the blond batter. But, supposedly, the only chocolate she had available was a Nestlé semisweet bar, and she was too rushed to melt it.

Wielding an ice pick, she chopped the bar into pea-size bits and dribbled them into the brown sugar dough with nuts. (Susan Brides, a pastry chef, assisted.) Instead of melting into the dough to produce an all-chocolate cookie, the bits remained chunky as they baked.

[ Read about Ruth Wakefield's chocolate chip cookie recipe on NYT Cooking.]

In her " Great American Chocolate Chip Cookie Book," Carolyn Wyman rejected the prevailing theory that the recipe was developed inadvertently. Mrs. Wakefield was too perfectionist a cook. "Confusion is unknown," a promotional brochure for her restaurant boasted.

"Nowadays, people love the 'dumb luck' story of the person who wins the lottery, or invents something because they were doing something else," Wyman wrote about Wakefield's innovation. "But what she did was still revolutionary."

Ruth Graves was born on June 17, 1903, in East Walpole, Mass., the daughter of Fred Graves and the former Helen Vest Jones.

She was raised in Easton., Mass., and attended the Framingham State Normal School Department of Household Arts (now Framingham State University). After graduating in 1924, she taught home economics at Brockton High School, lectured on food and worked as a hospital dietitian and a customer service director for a utility company.

In 1926, she married Kenneth Wakefield, a meatpacking company executive. Four years later, the couple bought a building in Plymouth County, Mass., and opened an inn there.

The ruins of the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Mass., after a fire damaged the property in 1984. Credit Barry Allen/Boston Globe, via Getty Images

That establishment, the Toll House Inn on Bedford Street in Whitman, eventually expanded from seven to more than 60 tables. It became a destination, famous for its sea foam salad ring (with lime gelatin), lobster dishes and desserts, including Boston cream and lemon meringue pies, Indian pudding and baba au rhum and other recipes Wakefield had inherited from her grandmother or created herself.

She included some of them in a cookbook, " Ruth Wakefield's Tried and True Recipes " that she published in 1931. Her enduring chocolate chip cookie recipe first appeared in a later 1930s edition.

Her Toll House cookie recipe was reprinted in The Boston Herald-Traveler, and Wakefield was featured on "Famous Foods From Famous Eating Places," the radio program hosted by Marjorie Husted (who was known as Betty Crocker).

In 1939, Wakefield sold Nestlé the rights to reproduce her recipe on its packages (supposedly for only $1) and was hired to consult on recipes for the company, which was said to have provided her free chocolate for life.

Nestlé began pre-scoring its chocolate bars for easy baking, then introduced Nestlé Toll House Real Semi-Sweet Chocolate Morsels which became known as chocolate chips. (For the record, Allison Baker, a Nestlé spokeswoman, said that the morsels do, in fact, melt, but retain their shape because of the way the fat structure of the tempered chocolate is aligned.)

Wakefield's recipe was printed on the package. (It was later updated to account for the availability of pre-sifted flour and other modern ingredients.)

When Wakefield added the recipe to her cookbook in the later edition, she included this explanatory note: "At Toll House we chill this dough overnight. When ready for baking, we roll a teaspoon of dough between palms of hands and place balls two inches apart on greased baking sheet. Then we press balls with finger tips to form flat rounds. This way cookies do not spread as much in the baking and they keep uniformly round."

The cookies grew so popular - they became known beyond New England during World War II when soldiers from Massachusetts shared their care packages from home - that the name became legally generic.

In 1983, a federal judge ruled that Nestlé, which now sells about 90 billion individual morsels annually, was no longer entitled to exclusive rights to the Toll House trademark.

In 1967, the Wakefields sold the inn. (It burned in 1984.) The couple retired to Duxbury, Mass., where Ruth Wakefield died in 1977. She was survived by her husband; a son, Kenneth Donald Wakefield Jr.; and a daughter, Mary Jane Wakefield.

The only remnant of the inn is a historical marker, but the Nestlé Toll House cookie lives on. It has been imitated and embellished with other ingredients, but, Marian Burros wrote in The New York Times in 1985, none of the variations "have ever really improved on Ruth Wakefield's original recipe."
Join us for "Overlooked, But Not Forgotten," a live reading and discussion of the Overlooked series, on March 28 in New York City. Tickets are available for purchase here.

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Overlooked No More: Ruth Wakefield, Who Invented the Chocolate Chip Cookie

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Legend has it that Wakefield was trying a variation on a butterscotch dessert when she decided to let the chocolate chips fall where they may. Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. With Overlooked , we're adding the stories of remarkable people.

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Obituary writing is more about life than death: the last word, a testament to a human contribution.

Yet who gets remembered - and how - inherently involves judgment. To look back at the obituary archives can, therefore, be a stark lesson in how society valued various achievements and achievers.

Since 1851, The New York Times has published thousands of obituaries: of heads of state, opera singers, the inventor of Stove Top stuffing and the namer of the Slinky. The vast majority chronicled the lives of men, mostly white ones; even in the last two years, just over one in five of our subjects were female.

Charlotte Brontë wrote "Jane Eyre"; Emily Warren Roebling oversaw construction of the Brooklyn Bridge when her husband fell ill; Madhubala transfixed Bollywood; Ida B. Wells campaigned against lynching. Yet all of their deaths went unremarked in our pages, until now.

Below you'll find obituaries for these and others who left indelible marks but were nonetheless overlooked. We'll be adding to this collection each week, as Overlooked becomes a regular feature in the obituaries section, and expanding our lens beyond women.
You can use this form to nominate candidates for future "Overlooked" obits. Read an essay from our obituaries editor about how he approaches subjects and learn more about how the project came to be.

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Remarkable Women We Overlooked in Our Obituaries

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Obituary writing is more about life than death: the last word, a testament to a human contribution. Yet who gets remembered - and how - inherently involves judgment. To look back at the obituary archives can, therefore, be a stark lesson in how society valued various achievements and achievers.