Mrs. Field's Cookies

OK, so everyone has heard the story. A woman is overcharged for a recipe and decided to get back by making sure everyone in the country gets the recipe for free. My version is probably at least 20 or more years old, so instead of being distributed online it was distributed via fax. Ok, I may be aging myself.

These chocolate chip cookies are fabulous and always cook up beautifully. These days my husband helps me make them. The batter gets very thick so I let him stir it. There are well worth the effort and it makes a load of cookies - approximately 112.

Ah, what the heck, I'll give you the story that comes with this old version and the story behind this urban legend...

A woman who works with the American Bar Association called Mrs. Field's cookies and asked for the attached recipe. She was told there was a two-fifty charge for the recipe. She assumed it was $2.50 and she charged it to her VISA. It was not $2.50, but $250.00. In order to get her monies worth she is passing the recipe out to everyone. Take a copy and give it to a friend with her blessings.

Mrs. Field's Cookies

Cream together:

2 cups butter
2 cups sugar
2 cups brown sugar

Add:

4 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla

Mix together:

4 cups flour
5 cups oatmeal (put small amounts into blender until it turns into powder. Measure first then blend.)
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoon baking powder
2 teaspoon baking soda

Mix together all ingredients.

Add:

24 oz. bag chocolate chips
8 oz. Hershey bar (grated)
3 cups chopped nuts (any kind)

Bake on ungreased cookie sheets. Make golf-ball sized cookies and place them on the cookie sheet 2 inches apart. Bake at 375 degrees for 10 minutes.

The cookies may seem like they should stay in the oven longer but take them out, they firm up. Combine the final batter in a really big bowl - it's a lot! This recipe make around 112 cookies.

Click here to print this recipe

Courtesy of urbanledgends.about.com:

Here is a "true story" almost everyone has heard by now, generically known as "The $250 Cookie Recipe" and most recently associated with the Neiman Marcus company, though during the 1980s it was the bane of cookie diva Mrs. Fields.

If you hadn't figured it out already, it is not true, by the way. It's a classic urban legend -- a variant of a popular tale traced by folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand as far back as 1948, when the ridiculously expensive recipe yielded a red velvet fudge cake belonging to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, the asking price for which was $25.

The current adjusted-for-inflation version (reproduced above) is still making the email rounds and its popularity shows no signs of waning, even though it has been debunked repeatedly over the past two decades. To paraphrase the ancient Klingon proverb, "Revenge is a dish best served warm out of the oven."

As to the recipe itself, I haven't tried the cookies, but by most accounts it yields damn good ones (and plenty of them). No one knows whose kitchen it came from, but we do know it wasn't Neiman Marcus, whose restaurant didn't even sell chocolate chip cookies when this legend first began circulating. The company chefs did create a chocolate chip cookie recipe after the fact, however, which Neiman Marcus now distributes free of charge as an antidote, if you will, to the defamatory urban legend. Bon appetit!

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