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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.”