Several years went by before I saw my next clone recipe. In 1987 the second clone recipe I tried showed up in my mailbox in the form of a chain letter. At the time, these snail mail chain letters were similar to the chain letter spam that we get in our e-mail boxes today: Someone tells an inspirational/sad/angry story and asks you to make a copy of the letter and send it to five of your friends. If you break the chain, the letter warns, bad things will happen. Ooh, scary.
The chain letter I got told the story of a woman who visited a Mrs. Fields cookie store and asked for the chocolate chip cookie recipe. They told her that she could buy the recipe for two-fifty, and that she could put the charge on her credit card. She certainly could afford the bargain price of $2.50 cents for the recipe, so she immediately handed over her card. But several weeks later when the woman received her credit card statement she was shocked to see a charge for $250! When she went back to the cookie store they refused to refund her money since she had already received the recipe. So she decided to get even by sending the recipe along with her “story” out in a chain letter, which then proceeded to quickly spread across the country.
To this day no one knows who created that chain letter, but the story is obviously made up – Mrs. Fields would never sell her trade secret. And the recipe produced a cookie that tasted nowhere near as yummy as one made by Mrs. Fields. When I tried the recipe I knew it couldn’t possibly be real since the cookie was downright gross. Just to compare I drove to the Mrs. Fields store at a nearby mall to get the real thing, and that’s when I saw the sign. On the countertop was a placard that completely discredited the chain letter recipe and its story – the same chain letter that I had received. “Wow,” I thought, “this recipe must have become very popular.” I eventually found out that the company had posted similar signs in each of its 450 cookie stores! Indeed, this one little “secret” recipe had become quite a phenomenon. That’s the exact moment I realized that people love copycat recipes, especially if the recipes produce copies of well-known products.
My next step was to find out if I was able to improve the recipe so that it tasted more like the original chocolate chip cookie. It was just a cookie after all, and I knew how to make cookies. I got to work in the kitchen and over several days, after making a huge mess and a dozen or so batches, I finally had done it: I had baked my very own Mrs. Fields chocolate chip cookie clone from scratch in my own kitchen. I had just created my first clone recipe of a famous brand-name food!
I shared the cookies with friends, with family, with co-workers, and asked them all what they thought the cookies tasted like. When everyone said, “A Mrs. Fields cookie,” I had the confirmation I needed. I decided to create a bunch more clone recipes which would hopefully develop into a cookbook unlike any that had been published before. I got right to work. I found my Kahlua recipe from college, and improved it. Now, I had two recipes!
I had no way of knowing it at the time, but this was the very beginning of an adventure that would continue through the next two decades.
(Excerpted from Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 3, to be released on 9/28/2010)
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