A Harte Appetite: When the chips are down

Just as summer was about to start this year, The New York Times published (heart) breaking news about one of the joys of the upcoming season: chocolate chip ice cream. Apparently it’s gone out of favor. With the growing number of choices in store freezer compartments, like cookies and cream and cookie dough, consumers now think of classic chocolate chip ice cream as too plain.

Chocolate chips deserve more respect. After all, ice cream made with them is the President’s favorite. Moreover, they are an ingredient you don’t have to worry about using with too heavy a hand. You can’t. Curiously, they were invented after, not before, the creation of their most famous application, the chocolate chip cookie.

Perhaps you’ve heard the story of how the chocolate chip cookie was invented. So the tale goes, it was devised by Ruth Wakefield, the proprietor of the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts, in 1938. The Inn was a popular destination, patronized by the likes of Joseph Kennedy and Gloria Swanson, presumably at their own table for two. The restaurant featured an upscale menu in which desserts were as important as mains. Among Wakefield’s specialties were a three-inch tall lemon meringue pie, baba au rhum, and the classic New England Indian pudding.

Also on the menu was a thin butterscotch cookie, called the Butter Drop Do, served with ice cream. Wakefield wanted to jazz it up a little and so thought she would melt unsweetened chocolate and add it to the dough. But she didn’t have any and had to resort to a bar of Nestle’s semi sweet chocolate. Not wanting to take the time and trouble to melt it, she took an ice pick, chopped it into bits, and added it to the dough, some say expecting the chocolate to melt as the cookies baked. It didn’t. And the rest, as they say, is history.

It’s a great story and a memorable legend, but some critics are skeptical. They point out that Wakefield was a trained cook, a perfectionist in charge of a highly regarded restaurant where, according to its own brochure, “confusion is unknown” in the kitchen. She was hardly an unwitting chef. They say she had to know what she was doing.

Whatever the case, the cookie became immensely popular. For the rights to her recipe, Wakefield got one dollar and a lifetime supply of Nestle’s chocolate, though the company, of course, has made billions of dollars on her recipe. Still, not a bad deal if, like me, you prize chocolate over currency. Nestle began including a small chipper with each package of its semi-sweet chocolate bars and ultimately came out with the now familiar teardrop shaped “morsels,” (their preferred term) some three years following the creation of its most famous namesake.

Granted, there were some mentions of chocolate chips before all this happened, but they really were not the chocolate chips we know today. Most notably, perhaps, was a chocolate chip recipe from 1894. But it was for tea biscuits whose shape resembled chips of wood. Moreover, the chocolate was melted, not chunked. Even Ruth Wakefield herself did not initially use the term chips, calling her invention Chocolate Crunch Cookies.

It’s a shame that ice cream makers are neglecting such a storied ingredient as chocolate chips. But you don’t have to let the chips fall where they may. Make your own chocolate chip ice cream. As today’s recipe reveals, it’s easier than you might think. You don’t even need an ice cream maker.

Triple Chip Ice Cream

This no-churn recipe, adapted from An Oregon Cottage (anoregoncottage.com), calls for three kinds of chocolate chips–dark, milk, and white–and, for good measure, calls for roasted or caramelized white chocolate to boot.

• 1 can (14 ounces) sweetened condensed milk

• 1 tablespoon vanilla

• Pinch salt

• 2-1/2 cups heavy cream

• 1/2 cup each dark, milk, and roasted white chocolate chips (such as Valrhona Blonde or Callebaut Gold)

Whip cream until stiff peaks form. Stir vanilla and salt into can of condensed milk and fold into whipped cream, combining completely. In a food processor, chop each chocolate separately to create both fine and larger chunks and fold into cream mixture. Cover and freeze overnight.

Tom Harte’s book, “Stirring Words,” is available at local bookstores. A Harte Appetite airs Tuesdays at 7:42 a.m. and 5:18 pm on KRCU, 90.9 FM. Contact Tom at semissourian.com or at the Southeast Missourian, P.O. Box 699, Cape Girardeau, Mo., 63702-0699.