COOKING THE DOUGH IS A WASTE OF ENERGY (via Glenn Dryfoos):

Perfection? Hint: It’s Warm and Has a Secret (DAVID LEITE, 7/09/08, NY Times)

TOO bad sainthood is not generally conferred on bakers, for there is one who is a possible candidate for canonization. She fulfills most of the requirements: (1) She’s dead. (2) She demonstrated heroic virtue. (3) Cults have been formed around her work. (4) Her invention is considered by many to be a miracle. The woman: Ruth Graves Wakefield. Her contribution to the world: the chocolate chip cookie.

One day in the 1930s, Mrs. Wakefield, an owner of the Toll House Inn, in Whitman, Mass., 23 miles south of Boston, was busy baking in her kitchen. Depending on which of the many legends you subscribe to, the fateful moment may have happened when a bar of Nestlé semisweet chocolate jittered off a high shelf, fell into an industrial mixer below, and shattered, or when Mrs. Wakefield, in a brilliant move to make her Butter Drop Do cookies a bit sexier, chopped up a bar of chocolate and tossed in the pieces. Whether by accident or design, her Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookies delighted her customers and became the culinary mother to an august lineage that almost 80 years later is still multiplying and, in some cases, mutating.