Foodish History: ANZAC Biscuits
There's no playing fast and loose with this protected recipe! Read MoreAnzac biscuits are a very specific biscuit. I usually don’t have a lot of time for food snobbishness that says one recipe can’t be authentic because it wasn’t made with this or included that. But in the case of ANZAC biscuits the word itself is legally protected.
ANZAC is an acronym that stands for the Australia and New Zealand Army Corp. Now, if you don’t know it, you can look up the whole sorry story about the disastrous Gallipoli landing in WWI. Basically, it was a military failure where men who didn’t die storming the beaches had to bunker down in trenches in terrible conditions in the searing Turkish heat.
ANZAC Biscuits
Legal protection…for a recipe?
Military rations for the original ANZACs included hard tack biscuits called at the time ‘ANZAC biscuits’, but they were horrible, unpalatable things. More appealing were the biscuits sent in care packages from home by women who knew a hard, eggless biscuit with a good amount of sugar would last the long distance from home to the front.
The recipe started appearing in recipe books in the 1920s and did evolve over time, but shortly after the war the government introduced legislation to protect the memory of these soldiers including restrictions on how the word ANZAC could be used. To this day, if you want to call a biscuit an ANZAC biscuit and sell it commercially (they probably don’t care what you do in your own home), it has to include certain ingredients. The Australian government issues fines for businesses who deviate from the recipe by using cheap substitutes for butter or adding anything as scandalous as chocolate chips to the mix. Also don’t call it a cookie! They don’t like that either!
Traditional Anzac Biscuit Recipe
The recipe I use for these traditional Australian biscuits was hand written by my mother in law who had to learn to cook the biscuit when she arrived in Australia from South Africa. I’m not sure where she got it, but it’s very similar to recipes I have seen in Australian Women’s Weekly Cookbooks over the years. However, there’s not much variation between ANZAC Biscuit recipes because the word ANZAC is legally protected!
NB: I use Standard Australian Measurements so 1 Cup=250ml and 1 Tablespoon=20ml
Ingredients
- 1 cup rolled oats
- 1 cup plain flour
- 1 cup sugar
- 3/4 cup coconut
- 125g butter
- 2 Tablespoons of golden syrup (Note: According to my mother-in-law’s notes you shouldn’t try substituting this ingredient. Treacle is too bitter and honey is questionable. The Department of Veteran’s Affairs agrees, though for historic rather than culinary reasons.)
- 1/2 teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda
- 1 Tablespoon of boiling water
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 190 degrees celsius.
- Combine oats, flour (I rarely bother sifting), sugar and coconut in a large mixing bowl.
- Melt butter and syrup over a gentle heat, stirring as you go.
- Mix bicarb soda with boiling water and add to butter mixture.
- Add wet ingredients into dry ingredients.
- Roll into balls and put on greased oven trays (Don’t line the tray with baking paper). Allowing some room for the biscuits to spread. Press balls flat with a fork.
- Bake for 20 mins, switching the trays halfway through if your oven cooks unevenly.
- Cool on tray and serve with milky tea.
