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Top Secret Recipes, Inc.
The founder of Mrs. Fields Cookies was referring to an anonymous chain letter that revealed her famous chocolate chip cookie recipe. Or so it claimed. The letter told a story of a woman who bought the recipe from one of the cookie stores for $2.50 but later discovered on her credit card statement that she had been charged $250. She asked for a refund, but was denied. She then decided to "get even" by making copies of the recipe and mailing it to all of her friends and instructed them to do the same.
But there never was a vengeful woman as described in the story. And there was no $250 charge. And that definitely was not Mrs. Fields' secret recipe in the letter. Instead, it was a bad recipe for chocolate chip cookies which yielded way too many cookies, and, oddly, called for more oatmeal than flour in the dough. So—unless you wanted 112 dry chocolate chip oatmeal pucks that tasted nothing like Mrs. Fields Cookies—the recipe was a complete fail. The chain letter was a hoax, yet it multiplied and spread across the country like a virus.
I received a copy of the infamous chain letter back then, but I tucked the recipe away. Until one day when I happened to be at a Mrs. Fields cookie store in the mall and noticed a new sign by the register. The sign was a message from Debbi Fields denouncing the cookie recipe in the chain letter and claiming that she had never sold her recipe to anyone. Apparently the company had been receiving numerous calls and letters about the recipe from people complaining that the woman in the letter was mistreated, and that Mrs. Fields cookies don’t taste very good. The chain letter was causing the company a lot of distress, as Debbi Fields later explained in her memoir, “One Smart Cookie.” This recipe—the same recipe I received—had gone hardcopy viral, becoming a rapidly trending urban phenomenon that affected a national corporation.
The fact that this "secret recipe" had proliferated, so un-deliciously, was fascinating to me. If all those people enjoy using and sharing a bad clone recipe for a famous cookie, I figured there's a decent chance they'd like a good clone recipe for a famous cookie even more. So, I started baking cookies. Over the next few weeks—with a bag of real Mrs. Fields Chocolate Chip Cookies on hand for comparison—I made batches and batches of chocolate chip cookies until I had what I thought was a good copy. I was new at this game, so my cookie wasn't perfect, but it was certainly a far better clone than the chain letter version.