Hello and welcome to the menu, Monocle Radio's food and drink program.
I'm your host, Chiara Rimella.
Coming up, we meet the author with a hunger for bite sized baked delights.
It's one of those things where it's like once you, like, peel back one layer, you have to keep going and going until you get to the very core of it.
And so once I realized how much I wanted to kind of tell in the book, I kind of couldn't stop.
Also on the program, we get a taste of Dagestani cuisine in Tallinn.
Plus we head to an exhibition in Stockholm all about Andy Warhol's depictions of food and drink.
All that here on the menu on Monocle Radio.
Certain styles of cooking or recipes are very distinct to a particular location.
But there are some delicacies that pop up time and again across continents.
You'll struggle to find a country where biscuits do not appear as part of culinary tradition.
Sometimes they're associated with specific moments in the year and joyous celebrations, but oftentimes they're simply an excuse to indulge and share a sweet treat.
Food journalist and author Ben Mims fell in love with baked goods from a young age growing up in the United States.
But in his new book, Crumbs, he pays homage to little delights from all around the world, from Iceland to Nigeria, Sri Lanka to Venezuela.
His book traces the history of a myriad different recipes and how they have a special ability to people and communities together.
I sat down with Ben to find out more about what he believes the perfect cookie consists of and started by asking him how the idea for the book came about.
I had, you know, worked at several food magazines and media brands in America for many years.
And I always tell people that, you know, the first magazine I worked for was called Savor, and it was kind of took an anthropological approach to food.
And so every story was very rigorously researched.
We would comb through libraries to make sure that the food that our reporters were talking about was exactly as it was from anywhere all over the world, right?