Everyone’s home is different, so everyone’s favorite chocolate chip cookie is different, too. Chloe and I practically started with a cookie. We met while studying abroad in London. On our first day there, I’d walked to an outpost of Ben’s Cookies, a local chain of biscuit makers. I returned to the flat I shared with her friend, dropped off the little red box, and went back out. I didn’t think anything of it until the next day, when Chloe brought me another—she’d apparently eaten one of the cookies out of the box when my roommate let her in and wanted to replace it. Eight years later, we went back to London. I proposed in Hyde Park. We got Ben’s again. Honestly, the memories taste better than the cookies.
So I set out to make our cookie. And I had plenty of options.The explosion of online recipe blogs, loaded with saccharine stories about the origin story of each dish, lent itself perfectly to a food that’s as much nostalgia as it is flour and sugar. Trying to pin down the perfect, best, or consummate chocolate chip cookie reached a fever pitch in 2008, when David Leite asserted in the New York Times he’d discovered the perfect version of the dessert. His recipe, which prescribed salt and a resting period of 36 hours, was the result of taking something mellow and homebound as seriously as possible. “It actually changed the way people bake chocolate chip cookies,” Leite tells me. Suddenly, everyone wanted to take a crack at perfection: they added nuts and brown butter or suggested trying more brown sugar than white. It was the start of what Leite calls the “the great cookie wars.”
But even Leite, who helped push the idea of the perfect chocolate chip cookie, describes the chase as “Barnumism,” a show concocted more for entertainment than the actual results. “The world’s best chocolate chip cookie—there is no such thing,” he says. “What makes the best chocolate chip cookie is usually rooted in emotional context and emotional memory. You can’t crowbar your way out of it.”
Even Leite’s “perfect” recipe produces his perfect cookie—one that isn’t so far removed from the slice-and-bake rolls of dough his mom would bring home from the grocery store.“I remember being so freaking happy sitting at the snack bar eating these cookies with milk,” he says. To this day, Leite drinks an ice-cold glass of milk with his cookies.
The more “best chocolate chip cookie” recipes I found, the more I found that the only thing “best” or “perfect” about them was the story of their invention. Laura Sandford, the founder of the popular cooking site JoyFoodSunshine, first discovered her recipe for the “best chocolate chip cookie ever,” in the void. In between the births of their first and second children, Sandford tells me, she and her husband “had a few losses.” During that challenging time, a friend came over to make dinner, toting along some chocolate chip cookies. Sanford recognized this as the recipe—passed down from a mother-in-law to a sister-in-law to her friend—that checked all her boxes. She tweaked it just slightly. For her, perfection is in the simplicity. “No funny ingredients, no chilling time,” she writes. “It’s exactly what I thought a chocolate chip cookie should be and it has that special thing to me, too,” Sandford says. “Because my friends did this and brought this meal over during a really low time in my life,” Sandford says. Eventually, it would become the first recipe her daughter asked to make.