Leaving nothing but crumbs, Ben Mims finds global cookie inspiration

Any time of year can be cookie season but with winter and all its holidays approaching, we are about to enter Peak Cookie Season. For those who are looking for some international inspiration on that front, food writer and recipe developer Ben Mims has come out with Crumbs: Cookies and Sweets from Around the World, an encyclopedic book with more than 400 pages dedicated to cookies. 

Evan Kleiman: This book, Crumbs, focuses on cookies from all over the world. What made you want to explore such a wide canvas? And was there one country or region that particularly surprised you once you delved into it?

Ben Mims: I have been obsessed with cookies since I was a child and would always make them for Christmas, and kind of thought of them as just a treat for that time of year. Then, as I worked throughout my career at different food magazines or websites, holiday cookie time was always the most fun thing to do because it was literally pick flavors, pick shapes, pick traditions, and play around with them and come up with fun, interesting pieces of food that some have tradition but some don't. You can invent peppermint biscotti shaped like elves. You can do whatever you want to. They're very whimsical and fun. So I always really enjoyed the creativity that came around with combining different things to see what flavors or colors or shapes or textures came up with new and exciting cookies. 

At the same time, I'm always way more obsessed with history. Why certain things are shaped the way they are, why is this ingredient in there, why is this more labor intensive for certain people than for others? Those kinds of things really informed where cookies came from and where they are today. 

I would say a country that intrigued me the most... I wasn't really surprised when I started looking at Italian cookies. I knew there were going to be a lot but I didn't realize that it would be so many. I think I wrote in the book that Italy has as many cookies as they do pasta shapes. It's endless. They make an art out of turning scraps of dough into fun objects and fun shapes and figuring out different ways to flavor them. The Italian cookies were really good. 

They also showed such a strong Arabian influence, a North African influence, a Middle Eastern influence. I think most people think of Italy as part of Europe, and it is, but it does have such a strong North African, Middle Eastern flavor profile in many of its cookies. That led me to create the Mediterranean chapter, which encompasses most of the countries in North Africa, Spain, Portugal, and Italy. There's something about being tied to that region and the climate that all of their cookies seem to have a throughline of similar ingredients that made them all part of one world.

Known as Chokladsnittar, these Swedish cookies have an eye-catching appearance thanks to the cocoa used in the dough. Photo by Simon Bajada.

Give us an example of one Italian cookie that you really love.

My favorite Italian cookie, I think, from the book, because of the ingredient that it uses, was the Fave dei Morti, which are the fava bean-shaped, amaretti-style cookies that are used for Day of the Dead celebrations. In one part of Italy, they are dyed red with, I believe, you pronounce it alchermes, which is that red, bitter liquor that's made from the crushed exoskeletons of beetles. It's not really made that way anymore but it has this particular Campari red color to it. 

They flavor one piece of the dough like that, one with cocoa powder and rum, and then leave the other one plain. So you have this mix of colors. They're really chewy. They have this beautiful thumb print indentation. They're a really gorgeous mix of colors for a holiday table. I didn't really know at the time that Italians celebrate the Day of the Dead in a similar way that let's say Mexicans or other Latin American countries do. That was an education for me, too, so I think that's my favorite from the region.

I love that. You've divided the recipes in the book into 13 sections arranged in really interesting and not super obvious geographical ways, like Southwest Asia, the Levant, Scandinavian, Sub-Saharan Africa. I would like to try to get through as many recipes as we can, one from each section, so this is gonna kind of be a speed round of cookie description. Let's start with the peanut topped sugar cookies the Cinq Centime from Senegal.

These are really delicate, small butter cookies that were originally the size of the five centime coin, the French coin. Now, they've gotten a little bit bigger but they're just a good, basic butter cookie spread with natural peanut butter and then sprinkled with more salted chopped peanuts on top.

Mmmmmm. Okay, now we go to Vietnam for the Swirled "Pig's Ears" Cookies.

Think of these as the old fashioned, spiral, rolled cookies that we grew up slicing and baking here in America. These are sliced super thin. They have a vanilla and cocoa dough that are rolled together, and then they're deep fried so they buckle and curl up and look like pigs ears. They're often sold on the streets in Vietnam but now, more and more people are making them at home.

If you want, you can add saffron to these Persian raisin cookies to give them a yellow hue. Photo by Simon Bajada.

We have to include peanut butter cookies from the US.

Peanut butter cookies in the US, unlike other cookies, can be traced back to George Washington Carver's peanut text about popularizing peanuts. Those original cookies were actually chocolate chip cookies but instead of chocolate chips, they're just peanuts added. There was no peanut butter. Then, in the 1930s, with the advent of industrially processed peanut butter, more cookies began using those. Now, those are the classic cookies that we look to today, with that iconic cross hatch pattern on top.

Now from Iceland, the Licorice and Chocolate Meringue Cookies. I'm a licorice aficionado, so these really spoke to me.

These are one of the few meringue cookies in the book. I chose to include them because the cocoa fat from the chocolate chips adds a softness to these meringues. It's an odd combination that I found I loved. It's just chocolate covered licorice, more chocolate, some brown sugar, a really crisp meringue that ends up being nice and chewy, and the sweetness and the bitterness of the cocoa really play off that licorice flavor wonderfully.

Give me an example of a printed cookie and talk briefly about the history of printed cookies and give us a modern example.

Printed cookies, one of the best examples is the Dutch Speculaas Cookies. Those were historically dough made from flour and honey that was pressed into a relief mold, and then you bang it out, cut it into little cells, and bake it up. There's some reports that I read where people would actually print the news in town, back in medieval times, on these cookies. You would go to the baker in town and read, and that would be an edible information treat about what was happening in your town.

I think many of the printed cookies today have gone away because cookie cutters and other ways to decorate cookies became easier and cheaper than having these more expensive molds. But one of the cookies that still lives in today's world is the Springerle, which is a German cookie. You can find rolling pins that have these really beautiful, intricate cells of animals and other types of pagan shapes and deities on it that you roll over cookies. Those bake up really light and crisp and hold their shape really well. 

A printed cookie is anything that has an image planted on top of it. I like them because they do all the work for you when it comes to designing them. You just press a mold on and you don't have to decorate. Everything just looks really beautiful and antique without a lot of effort.

In Spain, these pine nut-covered macaroon cookies are known as panellets. Photo by Simon Bajada.

One of my favorite cookies, I have to say, that became my pandemic comfort cookie are Atta Biscuits from India. Can you describe them?

These are a perfect tea time biscuit, as I'm sure you know. They are piped and so they're wide planks that have ridges on top, and they are really sweet. They have what's called atta flour in it, which is more like a durum wheat flour that has wheat bran mixed into it. It's not necessarily exactly like whole wheat flour the way we know of it in America. It has a more fibrous, crunchy texture but in a good way. I know that sounds bad but that's in a good way. They're really toasty so a lot of the toasty, nutty notes come out of the flour when you bake it. It's the perfect thing to dunk into tea or coffee.

Now, leave us with the Meringue-Coated Dulce de Leche Butter Cookies, the chilenitos, from Chile. Those sound exceptional.

The chilenitos were actually one of the first cookies I researched. I was really excited to pursue this notion of other areas, not just in other countries, but regions around the world that take something already popular and put their own spin on it. The alfajor from Argentina is the more well-known cookie. [It's a] very sandy, corn starch butter cookie that has dulce de leche and is usually dusted with powdered sugar or coated in chocolate. The chilenito is the Chilean version of that cookie. 

Instead of these sandy, dissolvable butter cookies, they make almost like a cracker. It's sweet. It has some sweetness to it but it's docked with a fork so it doesn't really puff up, and it's really light and crisp. They sandwich two of those with some dulce de leche, and then coat it with meringue. It's a little bit of a process and it's a little messy but it's really fun because you end up painting this cookie, coating it fully with this beautiful white meringue. 

You bake it, so when you pick it up to eat it, it just kind of dissolves in this vaguely crisp marshmallow coating and then you get to the really crunchy cracker cookie that oozes dulce de leche. It is one of the best textural experiences of a cookie in the book. Most are sandy shortbreads or chewy American-style cookies but this one has a texture of its own that is really wonderful. I would say, if anyone's looking to make the first cookie from the book, that's the one to make.

I have to say this book is unbelievably impressive. It really is an encyclopedia. Aside from the huge number of recipes, there is so much information in the head notes that describe the particular cookie and in the sidebars that cover everything from geography and history to ingredients. Thank you so much, Ben.

Thank you, Evan. I really appreciate that.

Chilenitos, meringue-coated butter cookies, were one of the first things Ben Mims researched for his book. Photo by Simon Bajada.

"I have been obsessed with cookies since I was a child and would always make them for Christmas," says recipe developer Ben Mims. Photo by C. Taylor Miller.

"Crumbs: Cookies and Sweets from Around the World" divides the globe into 13 regions, with recipes from each one. Photo courtesy of Phaidon.