485: Writing a Cookie Encyclopedia with Ben Mims

0:28This episode is brought to you by Resi and American Express. Cookies are meant for sharing. They're kind of like a big community-building food that doesn't really exist in other ways. And so I wanted all the recipes in the book to not be, you know, factory-made or industrially processed cookies. Like no Oreo, no kind of things like that, because no one makes those. I wanted it to be cookies that people authentically make at home. This is Taste. I'm your host, Eliza Barbanel. Ben Mims is a cookbook author, food writer, and recipe developer based in Los Angeles. He's worked at major media outlets like the LA Times, Food & Wine, Savoir, and Lucky Peach.

1:10And he's the author of a great new baking book, Crumbs, Cookies and Sweets from Around the World. Crumbs is something of a cookie encyclopedia, sharing the old world history and contemporary adaptations of global cookie traditions like Italian waffle cookies and Okinawan brown sugar shortbread. In this episode, Ben goes deep into his lengthy research and recipe development process.

1:41Ben Mims, this is Taste. Thank you for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. And I guess to start, I'm wondering if there was like a specific cookie recipe or moment that inspired the idea for the book. I wouldn't say it was a specific recipe. I've loved cookies kind of my whole life and I've been baking, you know, various different ones. But I do think that kind of the seed for the book was planted probably, God, 2010, 2011 when I first worked at Sever, which, you know, for anyone listening who doesn't know, it's like kind of a brilliant food magazine that was more like an anthropological look at cooking and food back in the day.

2:19And so they, I remember we were approaching Christmas and, you know, Suburb was the type of magazine to never do just like, here's a bunch of new fun flavors for Christmas cookies. So it was, you know, they said we need to do a Christmas cookie package, but like it has to be things that are authentically like based in, you know, reality, have a real story behind them, not just peppermint chocolate, whatever. And so I set about trying to figure out like, what are these cookies that were made specifically for the Christmas holiday? And so doing that story, we really kind of like changed how I thought about not just cookies, but most food, but just, you know, always trying to figure out what's the real story behind food, not just, you know, here's this fun flavor combination.

3:03So I think after that, every place I worked at after that, from Food Network or Lucky Pete or LA Times, we always wanted to do a Christmas cookie package. And so I kind of got that opportunity to kind of give people not just, you know, some new flavors and some new shapes and stuff, but also kind of give a little bit of history and give a little bit of extra information about cookies. And so when this book came along, that's pretty much the whole gist of Crumbs is the history and story and like how these cookies have moved around the world and tied to, you know, events throughout history or like, you know, things that were grown in certain regions, how they developed.

3:44So I always tell people, you know, the crumbs book does not have anything new per se, but it's going to have a lot of information that I think you didn't know about cookies that you're very familiar with. And I think it will turn you on to new cookies that you've maybe I've never heard of just because we're so limited in types of cookies that we make here over and over. So I think that is kind of the highlight just of the book for me. Yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense knowing your food media background that working on so many cookie packages would inspire a cookie book. I do think it's up there with Thanksgiving as like the tentpole of the year for all of these publications.

4:21And I grew up Jewish, like very unfamiliar with the Christmas cookie tradition. And then when I started working in food media, I was like kind of bonked over the head with how many cookies there are. And I really have to congratulate you on the book. It is like this encyclopedia of global cookies. And I'm so curious about what the research process was like. How did you go about making sure that you were covering all this territory? It was a giant feat at the beginning, I'll say for sure. I, you know, I was like, I have to start somewhere. So I, you know, grabbed a whole list of every single country in the world.

4:55And then I literally set about Googling, you know, this country with cookie just to see what would come up. And, you know, I think the original list, like when you do that, I ended up with like 870 something cookies. And so I had this giant Google spreadsheet. And I just I after I did that, which probably I can't remember, it took me like a month or two just to do a kind of the first stage of just researching every cookie and then going through and calling out ones that obviously didn't come from certain places. And then once I narrowed it down to like, I think it was like 350 something, that's when I started.

5:31And that kind of cut out all the ones you knew didn't come from certain places, but were just popular there. That's when I went into the library, started looking at every single cookbook, which, you know, from certain places like in America, in Western Europe, there's so much documentation. There's so many books that have been written just about that country's cookies. Whereas in other parts of the world, there's hardly any cookbooks at all that exist for any of their food, let alone cookies. And so I would take every single cookbook that I could find from specific regions, specific countries.

6:06And, you know, it wasn't as easy as just turning to the cookie chapter. Some of them, it was just like having to read about some of the desserts that they made and then kind of going down that rabbit hole and seeing how they how they even eat sweets in general and then trying to figure out if they've ever come up with something. And so it kind of that took a long time to develop the recipes. And then, you know, in doing a lot of the research, kind of the most fun, which is such a nerdy thing to say, the most fun aspects that I came about were finding where so many cookies that seem like different things are basically the exact same thing or have like a shared history.

6:44And one example of that are these mustache cookies from Italy that are very similar to the Rame di Napoli and all these other types of cookies in Italy, which as I was researching them, it turned out that they were all basically from the similar region. They all had the exact same ingredients, but just used in different ways. So like one would be a chocolate cookie with orange zest and powdered sugar on top. The other one is kind of a regular cookie, but it has orange marmalade and then covered in chocolate. And then pistachios would show up different places. And one was shaped round, one was a diamond.

7:22But they were basically all came from the same place. And so that was a way to take these four separate cookies and kind of condense them down into one. Where I kind of gave the history of like, here's where all these ingredients came from. Here's like the cookie that's most well known, that's most made today. and hear all the variations that come after it that are so similar. They didn't really want being their own cookie. It was just like, you know, change this to that and shape it this way and you get this cookie. So there's a lot of variations in the books, I think, are kind of more fun and kind of paint a better picture of these specific kind of like genres of cookies and how they spread about certain regions to kind of help you understand where those cookies fit into the culture.

8:09Yeah, I love this idea of cookie genealogy and you making this kind of tree of how they all relate. How did you go about adapting recipes from so many different global cookie traditions? Obviously, you want them to be your own recipe if they're in this book, but you also don't want to be, I imagine, like messing with tradition just for the sake of messing with it. sure sure and you know i i did want them to be my own but then i also kind of didn't i kind of i wanted them to be not um i wanted them to be a template like i wanted them to be as close to uh the original or as close to just like the basic um premise of what the cookie was originally meant to be and then so that you know once you make it uh if you decide you want to take it a different direction.

8:58You want to add more salt. You want to add more flavoring. Fantastic. But at least you know what this cookie was supposed to be originally. And so a lot of the cookies in the book, I tell people they are pretty, you know, crumbly dry cookies, um, with like just a few ingredients. And so I, of course I made sure to like make, make, uh, the salt a little bit more heightened than they would have been in the past and make sure they at least taste good as they are. But there's definitely ways to quote unquote, improve, uh, the taste by modern standards if you want them to be much sweeter you want them to be uh softer yada yada yada so a lot of the research was uh you know and again i did this at savour years ago i would there's a dish i was researching i would find every single recipe for it that i could uh kind of print it out lay it out in front of me or in this case i kind of copy and paste it into one document and i would just see what are the common proportions of let's say flour to sugar to fat what are the common flavorings You know, what does everyone more or less shape it like and so I kind of would take In some cases the average in some cases like just the majority of how people make it today And if that was different from let's say how it originally came about I would talk about that in the headnote and say, you know, this is how people make them today Originally, they were like this and I kind of would pick the one that Kind of was the best or made the most sense and so in some cases there's a cookie in the UK that it has a name that nowadays it is very different from what it started out to be but what the cookie is now and I'm blanking on the name unfortunately but it is it's it's basically a plain sugar cookie whereas when it first came out it had like all these different seeds in them and was like a huge like five inch diameter kind of wafer and so I was like you know we have enough type of cookies that are similar to what its modern variation is, let's give the very first original kind of like Victorian cookie that it started out to be.

11:02And there were these other cookies in a similar vein too that just the name was everywhere, but the ingredients in the cookie, the texture, the shape was all completely different. It made no sense. And so that was one where I was like, okay, we have to go back to where these cookies first started out and like how they first looked and then talk about how over time people just decided this is going to be the cookie that you kind of throw the kitchen sink into. But at least we know where they first started out from. So I want to dig into some of the recipes in the book with you. I feel like here in the U.S., we are very much like a nation united under chocolate chip cookies.

11:40But there are other cookies that are maybe deserving of of widespread acclaim and like being able to be made at home. Is there a recipe in the book that you hope would reach a similar status here in the U.S.? Oh, wow. That's a great question. You know, I would say most any cookie from Scandinavia, honestly, because they are like kind of the cookie miracle workers, I would say. And there are there are these types of cookies I'm actually surprised have never caught on more in the U.S., but in Sweden in particular, they're called like Snittar, S-N-I-T-T-A-R. And they're sliced cookies. It's literally, you know, you take a bunch of dough, shape into a log, bake the log as it is.

12:23It kind of flattens out. And then after it comes out, you just kind of cut them into these strips. And it's like the easiest cookie you can ever make. I think I have two variations in the book. One is called Cola Snittar, and it's just brown sugar dough kind of baked up and sliced. And the other one is a chocolate dough, which is made with cocoa powder. and has like the beautiful kind of like matte white pearl sugar crystals on top of it. And, you know, chocolate chip cookies is such a, you know, I found while researching this book, such a modern, the chocolate brown sugar, modern flavor variation that is big now, but it's never really been seen elsewhere in the world before it came along.

13:08And so here's, these are two examples where, you know, you have the chocolate, like you're the brown sugar where it's very similar, but it's older and really beautiful and so much easier to even make. Yeah, I love that idea. I'm curious on the flip side, if there's like a very technically advanced cookie, I feel like cookies are sometimes thought of as like, I think it's one of the first things kids learn how to bake. It's like a very accessible entry point, but cookies also can be very finicky. Is there like a technical baking cookie in the book that you would recommend to somebody who wanted to maybe push themselves?

13:40The most obvious cookie for sure for me would be the macaron from Paris just because that is people – it takes a lot of precise folding and certain types of mixing and all that kind of stuff. But there are other cookies, mostly from Germany or Western Europe, that use intricate molds or use a similar style of dough where you mix the dough. You have to let it sit for 24 hours and you have to cut it the right way and then it has to be baked in the right way. So there are, I think, in cultures like that that have had more time to develop, per se, a cookie culture. There are more complicated, elaborate recipes like that.

14:21But by and large, I kept all the recipes in the book pretty simple. I mean, aside from some in Western Europe that use like a specific mold that you have to buy, the cookie dough itself is pretty easy. You know, it's a little finicky to get out of the mold. But there are different, you know, there are lots of different variations and options to make it easier. There's very little that you need special equipment for or certain things like that. But I would say any of the ones, yeah, that like the like the macaron that are like kind of almond sugar based, they're going to be a little less, you know, dense and like firm to work with than a flour based cookie.

15:03And so those always can be fun to see how they spread in different ways. So those are kind of harder, I think, to grapple with than others. But I think using the techniques in this book, they're all pretty simple. And I think as long as you follow the recipes to the letter, it should work out fine for everyone. Yeah, the spreading makes me think about how important it is to rest some kinds of cookie dough and how I know this to be true, but it's still so hard to wait. Exactly. I feel like the culture of eating cookie dough is unusual to me when I think about it because I feel like eating cake batter is not really a thing.

15:40But I wonder how like people growing up eating cookie dough has maybe that's made us less patient as a society of bakers. Oh, totally. Because it's, you know, you get the same taste, but kind of much faster. And I think some people just love that taste of raw, crunchy sugar. So it just like kind of hits the veins faster than the cooked version, you know? Yeah, it does. Have you ever been to the Big Chill in West L.A., actually? I have not. What is that? It's like a frozen yogurt place that was very popular among high schoolers when I was growing up in L.A., and specifically they would do vegan and non-vegan cookie dough as a topping on the soft serve.

16:18They still do it. And I don't know why it was the thing to get the vegan cookie dough. certainly nobody was vegan and often you would get like the dairy ice cream but the thing was to get the vegan cookie dough as the topping on it and now every time I drive past it it always just kind of this craving comes into my head even though it honestly is not very good oh really okay I was gonna say I was gonna go go there today and pick some up but I will I'll wait till I'm on the west side yeah I think if you're on the west side driving down Santa Monica you should check it out. I'd be curious. Okay, absolutely.

16:51So I want to zoom out for a second. I'm curious, like after spending time with so many different cookies, like, what do you think it is about cookies as a recipe as a baked good that makes them so like beloved and representable of different cultures? Wow. Yeah, that was that was the question I spent, you know, making writing the whole book trying to figure out. But I would say it's funny, I was having lunch with a friend recently and we were talking about cookies and he said a phrase that I was so angry that I had not thought of before to put in the book this was after the book had been you know already been printed and I was like oh my god but he called it um cookies are condensed decadence and I think that's kind of like encapsulated the whole gist of the book um in which the question you just asked better than anything which was these are these tiny little you know very abstract amorphous blobs of just sugar and butter, just super decadent things that make you feel like you can have, you know, this kind of luxurious, decadent treat, but not like, you know, committing to this like giant dessert, a piece of cake or whatever it is.

18:02And so I think people all around the world, you know, just want a mark of sweetness to kind of either celebrate something, whether it's like a religious holiday or, you know, birthday or weddings, things like that. They want sweetness. And that's kind of a universal taste that everyone knows and loves. And so I think having, while yes, desserts and things are also a big part of the culture, they are more laborious to make. They don't keep as long. Whereas cookies keep for a long time. They, you know, if you just want One little bite of something they're there for that They're pretty easy to make as we said by kids and adults alike and they're kind of universal in that way and the also the main Point that I want to drive home about cookies with this book or at least with the recipes I included in the book Where that cookies are meant for sharing they're kind of like a big community-building food that doesn't really exist in other ways And so I wanted all the recipes in the book to not be, you know, factory made or industrially processed cookies, like no Oreo, no kind of things like that, because no one makes those.

19:15I wanted it to be cookies that people authentically make at home or in places where, you know, cookie culture has not been a huge thing, at least like the local bakery made them and made them famous. And so I want it to be simple things everyone can make to kind of share in this really kind of sweet, kind of innocent, simple treat that everyone loves to eat. Yeah, I think you hit on a lot of good points there. I feel like the portability of cookies or the fact that you don't have to slice them, you know, certain cakes, like I'm afraid to slice even because they're kind of precarious or so substantial.

19:49Like there is something about a cookie that you can just kind of tuck it in your pocket, hopefully with a napkin around it. but I guess it depends on your pockets. You mentioned manufactured cookies a little bit before, like Oreos. I'm curious if you, what are your stances on store-bought cookies? Do you have any favorites? Do you look at them differently after doing this book? No, you know, I don't. No, I don't look at them differently. I think for many industrially like store-bought cookies, my stance on not making them homemade is that, you know, these factories and these companies they have access to ingredients and machinery that can produce better textures and more precise flavors than most of what we can get at home and so it's like why if it ain't broke don't fix it and i've never to this day had a homemade oreo that beats the store-bought sorry to say um and in most cases it's that way where it's always like you know cookies inspired by this thing and like i always would just rather have the one from the store because it's going to be snappier it's going to have the exact flavor that you want which is really hard to replicate with honestly like fresh uh better ingredients because they use so many like chemicals in those things so um you know i don't i don't dislike store-bought cookies i definitely eat an oreo from time to time i love another butter um those little cookies peanut butter cookies.

21:18But yeah, I try not to have them all the time. But if they're around at a party or like a Super Bowl situation, I'm definitely going to eat a few for sure. Yeah, I do feel like I have to commend. I feel like if you're going to buy a store-bought dessert, like Haagen-Dazs ice cream, quite good. Absolutely. Snack cakes, like not really good. But like cookies, they are significantly better as a class of like manufactured baked item, I would say. Sure, absolutely. Absolutely. I like what you're saying about just like the scale and the access of ingredients that makes that possible. Exactly. I want to switch gears a little bit and just get your perspective on food media.

21:59I really admire your career. You've worked at so many great places like LA Times, Lucky Peach, Food & Wine, Savor, etc. And I'm curious like what your perspective is on food media these days. Like, do you see any bright spots with writers or publications or creators you think are doing interesting work? You know, great question, because, yeah, I feel like when I first started in food media, it was pre not pre Internet. Oh, my God. But pre website, pre website recipes. And so I didn't even see, you know, I lived through, lived through. I started before all of that and kind of seeing the waves come and go through just online recipes to Instagram to now TikTok.

22:42And, you know, I've seen a lot of brands that I even used to work for go by the wayside or are gone now. And so or just, you know, shadows of what they used to be, I hate to say. So I at least when it comes to brands, I think more and more people care about personalities these days than actual brands. I think you know bon appetites videos series from years ago. I think that kind of had a hand in doing that as well You know, I talked to a lot of people when I was in New York actually at this party We were talking about cookbooks because I was there helping Some other people work on cookbooks and I was like, you know, what are the ones that?

23:23These were all like early 20-somethings and I was like what are the ones you turn to nowadays that you like and they named all personalities, like people on TikTok or former BA people or whatever, that they just want their perspective. Like the food is not new. It's not innovative. It's just this person's recipe for X, Y, and Z. And, you know, for a long time, I was just like, oh, that's not, you know, that's not what I care about particularly because, you know, I'm the guy writing history books about cookies. So I kind of care about the history and I don't really care about personalities per say.

24:00That said, there have been a few people on TikTok and on Instagram where I see them making their cooking videos. And I'm like, I want to eat that. That looks great to me. I like the way that they think about this dish. And I'm seeing all the details that for me matter, like how they slice certain produce, how they season things, how they drizzle olive oil or kind of sprinkle certain things I'm like oh you actually have you know what you're talking about you're not just making stunt food or you're not just making some random thing uh you actually have a lot of skill and so it makes me trust them more and a few of them have even gotten me excited about making things I haven't thought about in a while or just you know um kind of like brilliant ideas that um that why like you know why didn't I think of that myself so I think it's more personality based less brands.

24:54I have to be honest, I don't really read food magazines that much anymore. I'm very much more into, you know, collecting cookbooks myself and wanting to see what people are coming up with. And, you know, that's kind of the reason why I've gotten into my kind of side gig with helping other people write cookbooks is that, you know, I want, I'm tired of seeing cookbooks from restaurants that are too complicated and don't really speak to the home cook or ones from Certain personalities that don't really harness the thing that makes them so lovable and makes people want to go to them And it's just a collection of recipes So I want to help bridge that gap and be like, okay What is it that about your restaurant your personality that makes people want you?

25:37Want your recipes so much over anybody else's and let's figure out how to harness that in the best possible book for a home cook so I think that's where most of my energy is focused is just really good cookbooks, whether it's from restaurant, whether it's from a personality, whoever it is, but just the best way to relate the information so that people want to buy your book. So that's where I'm at. Yeah, I love hearing about that. And it makes me think about the fact that I do think like if we're talking about food media and how it evolved, like cookbooks are maybe one of the best examples of personality driven food media prior to social media, you know, with like Martha Stewart or Ina, like these kind of big names that I think publishers could rely on to bring in sales and that could like develop a relationship with their readers through books and then certainly through TV and other platforms as well.

26:26Absolutely. Yes. So in addition to working on these cookbook projects, I'm curious about what your kind of home cooking and baking life is looking like these days. Are you still touching cookies or are you taking a break? I did take a break for a while. It's funny. Back in January, I think I'd had enough flour and sugar to last me for a while. So I kind of have been – honestly, I've been toying around with a lot of gluten-free baking because I think I wanted a break from actual flour stuff for a while. And I was looking at most of the gluten-free stuff. And it's just I feel that at least and also doing the book, so many cookies in the book are just naturally gluten free because they just use, you know, before whole wheat or before all purpose white flour, ground nuts were used in basically everything.

27:19And so it kind of changed my perspective on gluten-free baking. And, you know, I think my stance on that is you can do gluten-free baking or you can do vegan, but doing both is really difficult and sad sometimes. And so thankfully, I'm not vegan, so I stick with gluten-free. But I don't want to use lots of different alternative grain flours or whatever things. I just want to use like ground almonds or just, you know, rice flour, like one thing and make it really, I want to make it as delicious as something you would find elsewhere in another recipe. Because I remember there was a, there's a recipe in the tartine book that Liz Pruitt did, where it is a kind of gluten-free cake, where it's just like almond flour with like sour cream and eggs is the entire, and sugar is the entire cake base.

28:11And it tastes just like an Intamin's, like yellow cake, kind of crumb cake mix. And I'm like, this is so good. This is actually better than a all purpose flour based crumb cake. So I'm just going to make this. I've kind of taken that as inspiration and trying to run with that. So I've been experimenting with that, making lots of jam because it's stone fruit season in L.A. and just trying to I go to the farmer's market and I buy like 10 pound boxes of fruit and then make jam with it. Just try to like, you know, capture the season as best I can. And lots of Greek food because the one thing I miss about living in New York is the abundance of really great Greek food everywhere.

28:51And there's not a lot of that in L.A. So lots of roast chickens and lemon potatoes and, you know, Greek salads and things. And also, I hate to say it, but speaking of like TikTok personalities, I have been slicing quite a few cucumbers into a cork container and doing those salads that I think his name is Logan makes. Yeah. Um, how does the shaking work for you? I think I'm the only person who's actually, I was having a fight with friends literally yesterday about this. I'm like, I don't think anyone's actually making them who's saying that it doesn't work because if it does, if you do it, you'll see that it does work.

29:30And I, cause the, the salt draws out the moisture in the cucumbers, that moisture mixes with everything else. Short answer. It works fine for me, no matter what I use. I think people just aren't committing to like the minute long, really vigorous shake that it requires. Because I think it's I mean, that's the thing. It's pretty brilliant. Like it's a cucumber salad new. Absolutely not. But I'm like, you know, he's creating no dirty dishes. It's really quick. It's no cooking. It's summertime. Like you can't ask for anything better than that. So even though, you know, he came across that and it was maybe an accident.

30:04I think it's a pretty brilliant way to get across this way to make a dumb, simple vegetable recipe, but make it super delicious with things that everyone already has in their pantry. Yeah, I completely agree. I have seen a lot of these videos and I haven't made one myself yet. But I guess if anyone's listening and they haven't watched this, we'll link one in the show notes. But this creator is making the whole cucumber salad, like dressing it all in a big deli container. and then you just shake it and then it's really well-dressed by the end of the video. I think you have to be vigorous with it is the takeaway.