United Nations of Cookies

New Zealand-born chef Jess Murphy has lived in Ireland since 2003 and has been based in Galway since 2005, where she opened her award-winning restaurant, Kai, with her Irish husband, Dave Murphy, in 2011. Kai is a place built on good energy, where happy staff and a busy kitchen combine to send everyone who visits out the door a little bit more content with the world. When Jess is not feeding or minding people, she is quietly fighting for an underdog somewhere here or abroad. She has been a formal High-Profile Supporter of the UNHCR since 2017, travelling to Lebanon and Syria with the UN Refugee Agency to spend time with Syrian refugees selected for resettlement in Ireland, cooking and sharing food with them, finding common ground and documenting some of the food heritage that risks being lost after years of war in Syria. Everything that Jess does has a vitality, immediacy and generosity based on friendship, relationships and respect.Eoin Cluskey has a passionate view of what the future of food should look like. Having travelled the world, he has learned about different cultures, lifestyles and, most importantly, food. For Eoin, food is about bringing people together; at the heart of its ability to do that - and of the history of food - is real bread. He creates food with the knowledge of how it can connect us and how it is connected to the earth, including how food is grown, how to treat ingredients with respect and how important the whole journey involved in ingredients making their way to our plates is. Today, you'll find Eoin in the heart of Dublin running his organic sourdough bakery, specialising in his renowned bread and creative artisan pastries. Eoin's recognition of the responsibility of making food ethically, seasonally and with the planet always in mind is inspiring and present in Bread 41's dominating focus on sustainability. The value-centric business prioritises community and involves them in their current journey to becoming a fully zero-waste business. Eoin is driven by a determination to better the future of the food industry and to create a food experience as authentic and unique as it is delicious.

• Introduction; Afghani shortbread; Khatira Hassanpour; American monster cookies; Brazilian snack biscuits; British jammy dodgers; Canadian fat archies; Dutch lemon & fennel crinkle cookies; Finnish spoon cookies; Greek Easter cookies; Hong Kong-style egg roll cookies; Indian chilli & coriander biscuits; Japanese wasabi cream cookies; Lithuanian lazy cookies; Malaysian peanut butter cookies; Mexican piglet cookies; New Zealand Anzac biscuits; Norwegian jam thumbprint cookies; Palestinian date-filled cookies; Persian rice cookies; Polish rose jam cookies; Somalian biscuits; Ifrah Ahmed; Syrian sesame & pistachio cookies; The Al Jamous Family; Turkish coffee cookies; Venetian butter cookies; Venezuelan egg cookies; Yemeni festive cookies; Sara Althobhaney

"It is impossible to underestimate the impact that Jess Murphy of Galway's Kai and Eoin Cluskey of Bread 41 have had on contemporary Irish food. Yes, they are both commercial organisations, but commerce is actually beside the point: they don't exist just to make money. Consider this: in a world where every food person wants to write a book, Jess and Eoin have handed over the authorship of their first book, Cookies, to a multitude of diverse people from around the world, people who either by necessity or by choice live and work in Ireland. The names of Jess and Eoin are on the cover, but the content is curated from the work of many others, a collation of adorable recipes for cookies, culled from all over the globe which they have gathered and tested to create a glorious wealth of sweetness that you'll want to cook each and every version. In a time where selfishness threatens to drown our shared humanity, Jess and Eoin's act of selflessness - their generosity - falls from the heavens like mercy itself." - John and Sally McKenna, McKennas' Guides"Absolutely loving this beautiful collection of cookbooks from Blasta Books, celebrating the diversity of food in and around Ireland." - Jamie Oliver "These small, gorgeous, single-subject cookbooks...are fantastic. And, clearly, deeply aesthetically pleasing. They're so beautifully designed and illustrated. I really love the whole enterprise." - India Knight