part0059

Companies seldom deny a negative rumor about themselves, since there’s a risk that people will learn the rumor from the company’s publicity and then just repeat it. But starting the first of the year in 1987, the 450 or so outlets of Mrs. Fields chocolate-chip cookies—the scrumptious ones cooked from scratch and sold warm in shopping malls—were displaying this notice: “Mrs. Fields recipe has NEVER been sold. There is a rumor circulating that the Mrs. Fields Cookie recipe was sold to a woman at a cost of $250. A chocolate-chip cookie recipe was attached to the story. I would like to tell all my customers that the story is not true , this is not my recipe and I have never sold the recipe to anyone. Mrs. Fields recipe is a delicious trade secret.”

Here’s the rumor: A woman supposedly calls the Mrs. Fields company headquarters in Park City, Utah, and asks for the recipe. She is told that it will be sent for a charge of “two-fifty,” which she tells them to put on her credit card. When the recipe and the bill arrive, the charge is $250—not $2.50, as she expected. For revenge, the outraged woman duplicates the recipe and sends it out to all her friends and relatives.

That woman, if she exists, must have thousands of acquaintances and a very large family, since photocopied sheets telling some version of this story have shown up everywhere, with the recipe appended. The Mrs. Fields telephone lines were kept busy with queries about it.

Many of the fliers refer to “a woman Grace knows” or “a friend of Jean’s mother,” or mention other women’s names in the chain of transmission. Several also make reference to somebody working for the American Bar Association being the overcharged party, which may suggest that lawyers and staffs have been active in spreading the rumor, presumably thinking it to be factual.

Some newspapers speculated that the story was started by competitors of Mrs. Fields to damage the company. But Sally White, a spokeswoman for the company, told me that she doubts that another company began it. She does admit that it “damaged our integrity. We are disappointed,” she said, “that anyone would think that Debbi Fields would sell her recipe.”

The Mrs. Fields cookie story is typical urban-legend stuff and, in fact, is probably just a new version of an old story called “Red Velvet Cake.” Thirty years ago, the story began circulating that the recipe for a bright red cake supposedly served at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel had been sold for an outrageous price—as much as $1,000—with similar results. The chef’s secret turned out to be the simple addition of red food coloring. The buyer took the same revenge of sending out the recipe.

I’ve checked with the Waldorf; they say the story is false. But this hasn’t stopped the continued circulation of the legend every now and then, along with a multitude of recipes for the supposed cake.

I think it’s possible that the cookie legend took shape right in Utah, where I live. Baking from scratch is an article of faith here, and recipe exchanges via church groups, neighbors, and newspaper columns are a big pastime.

Imagine that someone had a really good chocolate-chip-cookie recipe, which friends said was “almost as good as Mrs. Fields.” The recipe got passed around. After a while, people started to say that it really was Mrs. Fields’s recipe. Eventually, someone, half-remembering the older legend, unconsciously combined the two stories. If you stir in a telephone, a credit card, some chocolate chips, and adjust for inflation, you have a perfect yuppie legend.

There’s further evidence for this theory. The Mrs. Fields company moved to Utah from Palo Alto, California, in 1982, and the following spring was the first time I heard a prototype of the special chocolate-chip recipe—but not yet connected to Mrs. Fields. At that time, in a generic cookie legend, a Utah housewife was said to have received this special recipe from a restaurant (unnamed), but was required to pay an outlandish bill.

In August 1983, I heard the Utah story being plugged into the Mrs. Fields company directly, although without all the details of the later version. The legend probably received its present form in the next couple of years thanks to oral tradition and people’s imagination. Besides just word of mouth, people have mailed photocopies to friends or carried them along on visits. Others have posted the story onto computer bulletin boards, where extended discussions of the quality of the recipe have occurred.

By the way, the recipe does make a fairly decent cookie, although some of the ingredients are a bit odd. For example, it usually calls for five cups of oatmeal to be “powderized” in a blender, and for a Hershey bar to be grated in with the chocolate chips. The Mrs. Fields people say this is completely phony advice, and independent tasters agree that the bogus cookies are too dry to be mistaken for Mrs. Fields’s originals. (The latter statement is based on a blind taste test conducted by a student who used members of one of my folklore classes as subjects.)

Obviously, the recipe hasn’t put Mrs. Fields out of business. Nor has the “Red Velvet Cake” hurt the Waldorf-Astoria. Lately, the hotel has even turned the tables on the legend and started giving out free copies of that infamous “Red Velvet Cake” recipe-that-never-was-for-sale.

These generally stem from even earlier stories. Beyond that? Often no one knows. I’ve pinpointed the origins of several urban legends, but I wind up tracking most of them back merely to older stories—and that’s the end of it. Legends beget legends, but where it all starts remains a mystery.

So you can guess how happy I am when I find new sources for legends like the Mrs. Fields recipe rumor. This was one story I thought I had traced as far back as possible, to the “Red Velvet Cake” story of the 1950s. Then I received in the mail an even earlier expensive-recipe story, which had probably evolved into “Red Velvet Cake.”

A Cambridge, Massachusetts, a reader photocopied the recipe from a cookbook called Massachusetts Cooking Rules, Old and New , published in Boston in 1948 by the Women’s Republican Club of Massachusetts.

The recipe in the book for “$25 Fudge Cake” is credited to Mrs. Randall B. Hatch of Whitman, a town southeast of Boston. The ingredients and mixing instructions for the fudge aren’t very striking, but the explanation for the name is.

Mrs. Hatch got the recipe from a friend, who got it from a friend…. “This friend had to pay $25 upon the receipt of the recipe from the chef of one of the railroads,” the cookbook explains. “She had asked for the recipe while eating on a train. The chef gladly sent it to her, together with a bill for $25, which her attorney said she had to pay. She then gave the recipe to all her friends, hoping they would get some pleasure from it.”

This reference, in turn, when I used it in a column, triggered the memory of a woman in Taylor, Wisconsin, who wrote me to say that she remembered a story going the rounds in Milwaukee in 1949: “Some poor woman had to pay $ 100 instead of [what she thought was to be] $1.00 for Mrs. Stevens Fudge Recipe.”

Another woman wrote from Bloomington, Indiana, to say that many years ago, “probably in the 1940s,” she got hold of a chocolate-cake recipe that allegedly someone “in a restaurant down south somewhere” had been required to pay $25 to acquire. That woman was giving copies to all her friends in revenge for the high cost.

Believe me, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out eventually that the story of the expensive dessert recipe goes all the way back to the Pilgrims. I can hear it now: They got a great recipe for pumpkin pie from the Indians but had to pay dearly for it.

In the meantime, the Mrs. Fields story still pops up from time to time, both in anonymous fliers and in publications. The latest example of the latter I have seen was sent to me by Lydia Paley Hume of the American Embassy in Vienna. There it was—in the embassy newsletter Tales of Vienna dated February 26, 1988—complete with details about the $250 misunderstanding, the blenderized oatmeal, and the Hershey bar. And the editor’s source? It was listed as “a true story from the CLO’s [Community Liaison Office’s] line in Budapest.” I hope this story is not a communist plot.

And meanwhile, in the United States, variants of the recipe story continue to spin off. In December 1987, two residents of St. Louis, Missouri, sent me copies of the “$350 Union Station Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe.” (Interestingly, one of them was found posted on the bulletin board of a law firm there.) The station was recently renovated as a luxury hotel and shopping complex, and I strongly suspect that Mrs. Fields has an outlet there.

Another variation from the Midwest sprang up in Chicago, where a recipe alleged to be the very same mint fudge sold by Marshall Fields department store is circulating. Notice the name—Fields. Hmmmm. There’s something familiar going on here, too.

But the hottest variation on the recipe story—as of spring 1988—attributes the story and the recipe to a restaurant in a Nieman-Marcus store. This one has come to my attention in a Utah church-group newsletter, in news stories out of Wisconsin and Georgia, and in letters and fliers from several other states. Let’s take a look at how columnist Martha Hertz of the Athens (Georgia) Banner-Herald got taken by this “gotcha story,” as she called it.

Hertz wrote in her column on January 25, 1988, about “a friend of mine in Texas [who] periodically escapes reality by browsing through the stores in North Dallas.” The “famous chocolate chip cookies” at Nieman-Marcus were her special indulgence, so finally she asked for the recipe.

Hertz then gave readers the usual story associated with Mrs. Fields cookies and essentially the same typical recipe, concluding with another friend’s comment on the cookies, “You know, I’m not sure that $250 is all that much for a recipe like this.”

Time passes. The mailman brings Martha Hertz a sheaf of photocopies about “Red Velvet Cake” out of The Vanishing Hitchhiker from a folklorist at the University of Georgia. In her column for February 29, 1988, she revealed “some rather amazing facts” about the Nieman-Marcus cookie story.

First, her source: “The cookie story was told to me by a close friend I have known for years. She, however, had heard the story from a close friend of hers who knew the lady involved [and] was given the recipe by her friend in a Christmas card.”

Next, the facts Hertz found: a phone call to Nieman-Marcus brought her the news that the story is untrue and that the store does not even serve or sell cookies.

I think I’ll just bake up a batch of the not-really-Mrs.-Fields cookies, then dunk one in cold milk, and think about facts versus folklore a little more.