Chocolate Crunch Cookies

Just as Boston became the unlikely home of the Jamaican banana, so it embraced an equally exotic Jamaican import, chocolate. The first chocolate factory in the country was started in 1780 by John Hanan at Dorchester, Massachusetts, and financed by Dr. James Baker, who began Baker’s Chocolate. As a child, I thought those bitter squares of chocolate were called Baker’s for Baking in contrast to Hershey’s for Eating.

I had no notion that until the late nineteenth century, chocolate was