Kai’s Jess Murphy on her ‘United Nations of Cookies’ recipe book

I’d ring my mate Eoin Cluskey in Bread 41 in Dublin and tell him how I was managing to kill all my sourdough in Galway, and he’d tell me what he was doing.

He’d bought all these 1950s’ milk floats. We had this idea it would be cool to fill one up with raw milk and make a load of cookies and drive it to Dublin’s Big Grill Festival or somewhere. Who doesn’t love an ice-cold glass of milk with a really nice cookie?

Then I also had a call from Kristin Jensen in Blasta Books, who said: “What happened to that book about refugees and food that you wanted to do?” I told her it seemed like it wasn’t a book anyone really wanted in the doom and gloom of the world, both before and during the pandemic.

I told her about the cookies idea and how you don’t need to speak the same language to sit down with a cup of tea and a good biscuit. Biscuits — Eoin calls them cookies because he’s posh — are an international language. Kristin said: “That’s the book. Let’s make it.” I rang Eoin and told him: “We’re making a book together.”

We decided we’d do it for the craic and for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). I’m a supporter of theirs anyway, and I’m always keen to support and highlight the amazing work they do. If you ever found your home blown up, your city gone and your life destroyed, then they’re the people you’d want on your side.

Eoin and I had enough mates between us from all over the world to contribute the first recipes and get the book going, and things snowballed from there. One recipe is for Iranian rice cookies. We got that from Susan Golroo, who moved to Sligo in the 1980s — just imagine the culture shock.

Eoin tested making all the recipes in Bread 41. So many recipes didn’t have measurements, they were just based on handfuls of this and that, learned over years and years of making them. People don’t bring recipe books with them when they flee.

Then there’s Marlon Jimenez-Compton, who is from Venezuela and who came here in 2003 with just a suitcase and now has The Marlon Show on Dublin South FM. He contributed a recipe for the egg cookies his mother used to give him with a glass of milk when he was a child.

I first met Sami al Jamous and his family in Beirut, after they fled the war in Syria in 2013. I met them again a year later when they arrived in Ireland. They gave us a recipe for Syrian barazek, a cookie sprinkled with pistachios and sesame seeds.

We want the book to be a way of talking to kids and teenagers about how we’re all different but have so much in common.

There’s a lot in the making of cookies that hits home a message about how it’s cool to be different; how we’re not all the same size but have different colours and different shapes; how some of us have pistachios and some don’t, but we’re all tasty.

I’d love the book to be in every primary school in Ireland and I’d love, on World Refugee Day [June 20], for someone to go into schools and bake a cookie from their country.

What’s missing from the book is the Irish cookie, and I think we have to create that. I’d like to go to Áras an Uachtaráin and bake it with President Michael D Higgins. The national cookie could be the Miggle D. I think it would be a chewy spelt shortbread — it would have to be an intelligent flour.

Mostly the book is about cookies as a conversation starter. Every cookie in the book has a story, and they’re mostly stories about earliest memories and being at home with your mum or your gran.

For me, obviously, it’s the Anzacs. I bite into an Anzac, and I’m back in the Tardis to New Zealand in 1984.

‘The United Nations of Cookies’ by Jess Murphy and Eoin Cluskey contains 28 recipes for cookies, biscuits and crackers from around the world, and a short piece on each contributing cook and cultural context. Suitable for all abilities, but particularly children, all profits go to the UNHCR. Published by Blasta Books

In conversation with Sarah Caden