Anzac Biscuits & The Gallipoli Campaign

Gallipoli.

Before last week, the word didn’t mean a lot. Yes, it was associated with World War 1 and ANZAC day, the annual red poppies and entrenched in the national consciousness as our most significant military commemoration, but that was about as far as my awareness went. That all changed last week when we visited Gallipoli during our trip to Turkey.

We spent three hours with a local guide exploring the small stretch of land that makes up the Gallipoli peninsula. And I mean small. I had no idea that during the eight months of the failed Gallipoli campaign, the fighting took place on an area the size of Takapuna, or that the extent of their advance was only a few kilometres up scrubby mountainous land. The aim of the campaign had been to control the Dardanelles, the stretch of water that connects the Mediterranean to the Black sea and is thus the key sea route to Russia, who were allied with Britain and France, as well as to take over Istanbul, effectively putting the Ottoman Empire (now Turkey) out of World War 1. Those in charge saw the Ottomans as an easy target, expecting to take them by surprise, storm down the peninsula and capture Istanbul within 24 hours. Eight months, 44,000 Allied deaths and 87,000 Turkish deaths later, the Allies evacuated.

The main battlefields are now cemeteries, the trenches shallowed and eroded by time, and thousands of unmarked graves lie all through the valleys and beaches – now holding names given to them by the Allies. First was Anzac Cove, where the first NZ and Australian waves mistakenly landed on steep terrain, unnoticed by the couple of Turkish battalions in the area. Around the corner is North Beach, where more troops landed later that day – by which time the same Turkish soldiers had had time to set up machine guns on the hill facing directly onto the beach, resulting in a slaughter of the first arriving troops. Many were dead before they even set foot on the ground. North Beach is where they set up camp for those long, hard eight months, occasionally boating a few seriously wounded back to the offshore island Greek Island of Lemnos where their commanders resided in comfort. Up the hill is Rhododendron Ridge, where New Zealand battalions led the only successful taking of Chunuk Bair during the August Offensive, the high ground that was their goal. They held it for three days, before fresh Turkish troops caught them by surprise as they were changing guard with the British, forcing them back down to the beach camps.

Anzac Cove

A speech given by Ataturk, the Turkish front-line commander during the Gallipoli Battles who later became the first president of Turkey

The monument to NZ troops at Chunuk Bair

A Turkish monument depicting the moment a Turkish soldier picked up an injured Allied soldier from no-man’s land and took him back to the Allied trenches

The view of the Dardanelles from Chunuk Bair, which NZ troops held for three days

The whole campaign seemed like a tragedy of miscommunication and poor planning, a bloodbath of thousands of young men who never came home. Maybe if the very first arrivals at Anzac Cove hadn’t gone back to the beach to wait for the next waves of troops, they would have been able to come up behind the Turkish machine gunners and prevent the first deaths. Maybe if the British and other battalions up and down the coast had kept going further into enemy territory, rather than waiting three days for those at North Beach, they would have taken the Turks by surprise rather than giving them time to set up a front line. Maybe if they had some other way of fighting rather than trench warfare, madly rushing at each other over bare patches of no-man’s land, running over their dead friends and being shot down in droves, fewer would have been killed. It is a whole host of maybes, and nothing can change what happened. All we can do is learn from it, and remember those who gave their lives in vain.

I never thought seeing and learning about Gallipoli would be so affecting. But standing on the now peaceful grassy hills, covered in unmarked graves, cemeteries and monuments for both the Allied and Turkish soldiers lost, reading that they came from Otago, from Auckland, from Victoria and everywhere else, these 17, 18, 19 year old men with loving inscriptions on their headstones from their mothers who sent their young sons off to a great glorious war and never, ever saw them again, was heart-breaking. It brought it painfully close – these New Zealand and Australian boys the same age as my brother, who were probably terrified, cold and hungry, living in trench squalor, pushed into a war they never asked for and never having the chance to get married, to have children, to even live beyond their teenage years.

Lone Pine

I also hadn’t realised the extent of the Turkish fatalities – 87,000 were dead on their side. At one point, 10,000 were enlisted from high schools and universities in Istanbul and sent into battle in May with another 30,000t troops, with 3000 dead in one day of fighting. They had to declare the only truce of the campaign to bury the dead as the stench of rotting bodies, left for five days in the sun, was so horrific. Although most of the Anzac soldiers were young single men, many of the Turkish forces remembered in Gallipoli cemeteries were professional soldiers, in their thirties and forties, probably with wives and children left behind. I’m not sure which is worse – leaving children behind to never see them grow up or not having the chance to have a family at all.

An image of Wellington Mounted Rifles officers and men in a captured Ottoman trench on the summit of Table Top, 7 August 1915.

The remaining trenches, untouched since 1915

Anyway. This recipe is in remembrance of all those who fought at Gallipoli. A traditional recipe from NZ and Australia, ANZAC biscuits have been made since the 1930s, based on a biscuit recipe that mothers and sisters made to sent to their boys on the front. Those biscuits were teeth-breakingly hard, dry cookies not unlike a gingernut that had to last months, and became so inedible many soldiers ground them into their porridge. But never fear – this version, developed in the following years, is far more enjoyable – a buttery, oat-coconut biscuit, caramel tinged with golden syrup and brown sugar, and perfectly chewy in the middle with a bit of crunch around the edges. Notably, no eggs are used, probably because of the scarcity of eggs during war time and so they would keep for months when shipped. Of course, I had to give them a dunk in chocolate as well – who could resist?!

Print

Anzac Biscuits

Prep Time

20 mins

Cook Time

20 mins

Total Time

40 mins

 

Course: Baking

Servings: 16

Author: Claudia Brick

Ingredients

• 1 cup flour
• 1 cup shredded coconut
• 1 cup rolled oats
• 3/4 cup tightly packed brown sugar
• pinch of salt
• 130 g butter
• 2 decent tablespoons golden syrup
• 2 tbsp boiling water
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 200 g good quality dark chocolate , for dipping

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 160° and line a baking tray with baking paper.
2. In a large bowl, mix together the flour, coconut, rolled oats, brown sugar and salt. In a small pot, combine the butter and golden syrup and stir over a low heat until melted.
3. Dissolve the baking soda in the boiling water and quickly pour into the butter mixture - it should froth up with the baking soda. Add this into the dry ingredients and stir to combine.
4. Roll tablespoons of dough into balls and place on the tray, leaving room for the biscuits to spread. Press down on each gently with the tines of a fork to flatten slightly. (see photos).
5. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until golden. Leave to cool.
6. Melt the chocolate by placing in the microwave for 30 seconds at a time, stirring between each 30 second interval until just melted (don’t make it any hotter than necessary as it will only cause it to take longer to set on the biscuits). Dip each biscuit in the chocolate, holding for a couple of seconds to let the excess chocolate drip off, then place on the baking tray to set. You can speed this setting process up by putting the tray in the fridge for an hour or so.
7. Will keep for up to a week in a cool place in an air-tight container.