A taste of home and a bite out of history
Dessert is delightful and while cakes and pies are tasty, nothing beats a delicious chocolate chip cookie. Chocolate chip cookies always remind me of when I was a kid, and they always give me a sense of home. Their smell would always fill the house and served as the perfect treat for any occasion or no occasion at all. Aboard the USS Yorktown, chocolate chip cookies were just that, a reminder of home. When the men were on board, they would only have their few items to remind them of their lives back home and while the galley produced all of the meals for the crew, having that little something extra was always nice.
Being that there were 3,000 men on board the USS Yorktown, the chocolate chip cookie recipe had to make more than a few dozen. The famous recipe, which can be found on board the carrier today, produced 10,000 cookies! This recipe is quite impressive as it contains 112 pounds of chocolate chips. With this recipe, countless cookies were baked and devoured while the men sailed across the globe. When we think of cookies today it may seem trivial because cookies are accessible on a regular basis. However, back in 1943 when one would be quite some distance from home and not sure of when he would be returning, the smell and taste of something so simple would bring comfort.
While in the Smokey Stover Memorial Theater on board and waiting for the film to start, I watched an ad for Charleston Pops. Charleston Pops is now called The Front Porch Coffeehouse and Creamery, but they are the company that now produces the famous cookies once made on the USS Yorktown. The chocolate chip cookies are named after the Yorktown’s first Captain, Captain Joseph James Clark, famously known as Captain Jocko. Captain Clark was the first Native American to graduate from the Naval Academy and I personally thought that was neat. The name of the famous USS Yorktown cookies is Jocko’s Chocos. The Front Porch Coffeehouse and Creamery manufactures these cookies for the Ship Store (the gift shop) to sell. You can purchase one of these for $5.00 and all sales go back to funding the preservation of the USS Yorktown and the many components found at Patriot’s Point.
Capt. "Jocko" Clark who later became Admiral
Before writing this blog, I decided to take a trip down to the Ship Store as I left from a day of interning. I asked a nice lady behind the counter where I might find the cookies and she pointed me in the right direction. I walked over and chose four cookies and made my way home. When I got home, I told my kids and husband about this cookie recipe and how the very cookies we were about to eat were made from the same recipe used over 50 years ago. After taking a literal bite out of history, I can say with full honesty that the cookies are worth the hype.