Today is Anzac Day, a day I’d never heard of until a few years ago when I shared a house with a New Zealander. ANZAC is an abbreviation of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps: those Antipodean forces who served together in the First World War’s Gallipoli Campaign in 1915 whose service and sacrifice is remembered on the 25th of April, the anniversary of their landing, along with all Australians and New Zealanders who have died in conflicts since. It’s a public holiday in both countries and one with its own traditions: attending a Dawn service to commemorate the fallen and eating Anzac Biscuits.

At first I had the bright idea of buying some Anzac Biscuits locally for this entry. My nearest Blackbird Bakery – a bit of a South London legend – used to sell them but somehow between this Anzac Day and the last time I checked they’d decided to remove them from their baking range. So I was left to find the best recipe I could on the internet and have a go at making a few myself — and I’m so glad I did because they were delicious. Besides being a perfect quick-bake, easy-peasy-to-make biscuit. Here’s a photo of the results. (You’ll be pleased to know I restricted myself to two in one sitting.)

According to Australian food-writer Sarah Coates, it’s customary to eat Anzac biscuits with gunfire coffee (coffee with a dash of rum) but as I had no rum on hand and no gunpowder tea either I had some very English tea with mine. The biscuits tasted sweet and pleasantly chewy, something like a glorified flapjack but it’s the addition of the desiccated coconut (just 60g in this Australian Women’s Weekly recipe I found) which gives it that extra something.

It also illustrates just how far the Anzac biscuit has come. As the recipe curators put it:

The Anzac biscuit’s story begins with its sibling, the hardtack biscuit, which was a staple ration for soldiers and sailors during the war. These biscuits were very hard and flavourless, but were eaten as a nutritional substitute for bread. The texture and hardness of the biscuits were so unpalatable that soldiers attempted to turn them into something more edible, doing things like grating them up with water to form a porridge.

Reading about the awful scale of the losses suffered by the ANZAC forces in the First World War, I couldn’t imagine hard biscuits substituted for bread made their lives any easier. But the account of this unenviable fare also reminded me of the promise of Isaiah 30: “The Lord will give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, but your Teacher will no longer hide Himself—with your own eyes you will see Him.” Hardship really has a way of revealing certain realities to us when we pay attention: truths about ourselves, about others and about God.

Fortunately the history of the Anzac biscuit doesn’t end with makeshift porridge. From these unpalatable beginnings, the story goes, the Antipodean bakers added syrup, oats and coconut to soften and sweeten their hardtack mix. As Sarah Coates writes:

It’s a popular myth that they’re called Anzac biscuits because they were shipped to the ANZAC soldiers during the war. However, while it’s true they travel excellently and don’t contain any ingredients that easily spoil, the name “Anzac biscuits” didn’t meet up with these buttery, oaty cookies until the 1920s. In reality, the biscuits were more often made at home to sell for fundraising, or to serve at fetes and other events held to raise money for the war effort, and it’s this connection between the biscuits and the war that led to the use of the name “Anzacs”.

And the moral? This turning of something hard to swallow into something sweet brought to mind the story of Moses and the Israelites at Marah, a story that follows hard on the heels of their deliverance from Egypt and miraculous crossing through the Red Sea. After three days in the wilderness, they are craving water but when at last they find some they’re unable to drink it because it’s so bitter. In a soon-to-be-familiar pattern, poor Moses bears the brunt of their grumbling and takes the problem to God and God shows him a tree that he can cast into the Waters of Marah – perhaps a piece of bark or foliage to make the waters sweet enough to drink.

It got me thinking about what I do when I feel like I’ve come to a dead end or a bitter place in the flow of my own life. True, the answer might not be as simple as throwing a piece of tree bark into the water (or a handful of coconut into a hardtack biscuit mix) but the principle is the same. Am I tempted to complain or to blame others or give into a narrative of bitterness? Or do I go to God with the challenge – however bitter it feels – and trust him for a way around or through it?

Further Delectation

This handy tool allows you to find the Antipodes relative to your precise location (which, in London, seems to be a spot just off the South Coast of New Zealand in the Pacific Ocean).

More from Sarah Coates on Jamie Oliver’s blog and the Australian Women’s Weekly on the history of the Anzac Biscuit and different recipes you can try.

Remembering the ANZACs in Gallipoli. A moving thread on ANZAC war graves from a Sydney-based Latin-loving account on X (Twitter).

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