Taking Inventory: Cookie

A balanced diet is important for any Minecrafter, and it’s easy to put together a good meal. Mushroom soup with bread for the starter. Roast pork with potatoes for the main course. And for dessert? Well, how about our item of the week - the cookie!

Cookies have been in Minecraft since beta version 1.4,  which also added wolves and brown and white sheep. They’re made from cocoa beans and wheat, which made them originally quite hard to obtain as cocoa beans were only found in dungeon chests. Since Minecraft version 1.3.1 however, cocoa beans have become a renewable resource, meaning that you can eat as many as you like.

When eaten, a single cookie will restore a tenth of your hunger bar and 0.4 saturation points. That’s not much, admittedly, but given that they craft in stacks of eight, they’re a good snack food to top off a few health points during the course of an adventure.

If crafting isn’t your thing, then it’s possible to buy cookies from farmer villagers - you’ll get 18 for the princely sum of three emeralds. Whatever you do, though, keep them away from parrots...

Real world cookies are much tastier than the ones in Minecraft. People have been making cookie-shaped foods for millennia, but the modern sweet cookie seems to have its origins somewhere in 7th century Persia, when the use of sugar became relatively common. Cookies spread to Europe during the Muslim conquest of Spain, and by the 1300s they were pretty common throughout Europe. 

If you want a taste of the past, you could try cooking yourself some jumbles - a type of cookie that was favoured by middle ages travellers, made of nuts, flour, eggs, and sugar. Thanks to their dense, hard nature they could be stored for up to a year without going stale.

The name “cookie” comes from the dutch word “koekje”, which loosely translates to “small cake”. The Dutch first brought their koekjes to the Americas in the late 1620 through the colony of New Amsterdam, situated at the southern tip of Manhattan island, and was eventually anglicised to “cooky” or “cookie”.

Today, there are hundreds of kinds of cookies available all over the world, from the macaroon, to the hobnob, to the hamentashen, to the kifli, to the pepparkakor. But our favourite remains the classic Minecraft cookie. How about you?