ANZAC Biscuits

I keep an eye on holidays that aren't part of the usual US calendar. I noticed that ANZAC Day was approaching on April 25, a holiday that I knew mostly because of the little cookies (more properly, biscuits) that show up in grocery stores each April. ANZAC stands for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps and the day began as a memorial for soldiers who served in WWI, though today it covers a general remembrance for veterans from the two countries. It's a very important and solemn day, marked by traditional Dawn Services.

I was thinking about the holiday, my relatives who served alongside troops from AU/NZ in the world wars, and the myriad connections that America continues to hold with members of the Commonwealth. I also thought about the incredible wines that I've tried from Down Under, and how lucky I am to be able to enjoy them in peacetime, with clear shipping lanes between our continents.

And lastly, I thought about the biscuits.

The store-bought ones are tasty, but homemade is always best. I Googled around for some authentic recipes for ANZAC biscuits and began to get concerned. After all, if someone wanted a great BBQ sauce recipe, the internet might direct them to some perverted source in Texas or Kansas, surely a travesty against all that is good and holy in this world.

So I e-mailed Jane Cleary, my contact in Western Australia who has sent me many interesting wine samples through The Country Vintner. I asked her advice, and within an hour she called up her 93-year old grandmother and retrieved the family recipe. With her permission and my deep gratitude, I reprint it here, only slightly modified for American cooking units and spelling:

Nanna's ANZAC Bikkie Recipe

1 cup rolled oats
1 cup plain flour
⅔ cups sugar
¾ cup dried coconut flakes
2 tablespoons golden syrup*
1 stick butter
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 tablespoons hot water

"Preheat oven to 320°F. Mix the oats, flour, sugar and coconut in a bowl. Place the golden syrup and butter in a saucepan over low heat and melt. Mix the baking soda with the water and add to the butter mixture. Add to the dry ingredients and mix well. Sample some of the mixture (go on--it is so hard to resist!) Place tablespoons of the mixture, leaving space between each one for spreading, onto baking trays lined with non-stick baking paper and flatten to about 3 inches in diameter. Bake for 8-10 minutes or until a deep brown. Cool on trays for 5 minutes, then transfer to wire racks to cool."

Now, as longtime readers know, I don't have a sweet tooth, and I almost never write about desserts here. But it doesn't mean that I don't know how to make them. I'm actually pretty good at making cookies, and used my air-flow baking sheets lined with parchment paper. It's just that I don't often find myself in need of several dozen bourbon-pecan-chocolate cookies.

Let's get back to the ANZAC biscuits... Utterly delicious. Great balance of the butter, coconut, sugars, and oats. Next time I might even add a few crystals of sea salt on top just to play against that caramelized sugar flavor. A lot of cookie recipes require a dollop on the cookie sheet that will flatten over time, but these do need to be pressed into roughly the size and shape of the finished product, with just a little room left for expansion. These are fun to make, particularly with the heating of the butter and syrup, which negates the need for mixers. In fact, the brilliance of this recipe is that it relies almost entirely on dried ingredients that ship well--butter is the only perishable, and there's no chocolate that might melt. Butter/margarine/shortening/lard can last for a good while at room temperature and could probably be scrounged up somewhere, while traditional cookie ingredients like eggs or milk require fresher sources.

It's also worth noting that once baked, these cookies could survive a long, unrefrigerated sea voyage from the ports of Sydney and Auckland to the fields of Verdun and Gallipoli, a welcome treat for brave lads thrown into a war far from home.


*Note: Lyle's Golden Syrup is like a very light molasses (more properly a treacle) without any bitterness and with a luscious butterscotch flavor. You can substitute corn syrup or honey if absolutely necessary, but it won't have the purely authentic flavor... er, flavour. Lyle's invented the process and is the most popular producer. Founded in 1883, it has held a Royal Warrant to supply the British royal family since 1911. This stuff is tasty. I want to pour it on cornbread and distill rum from it.

The can and lid are the same style as wood varnish, and the logo is perhaps one of the ugliest in the world, depicting a lion corpse surrounded by bees. It's a Biblical reference, check out the link for more details. Also, I've heard this is really difficult to find in many parts of the US, so you can order it online if you like.

Larry Gonick's Cartoon History

In the fall of 1990 a 14-year old Benito read about something called The Cartoon History of the Universe in the science magazine Discover. He asked for it for Christmas, and received it. He read it over and over again.

That was the first step in a 20-year journey that ended last week.

Now, for those of you that are beginning to smirk at the idea of me reading "comic books" as a teenager and grown adult, I will kindly ask you to kiss my Scots-Irish ass. The first book in this series was edited by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (she saved it from the reject pile at Doubleday) and the work was praised by Carl Sagan among others. In a college World History course, I recognized the inferior quality of the assigned texts, and used TCHOTU I & II as my source material for exams. I was one of two people to get an A; the other being a girl that I was courting and with whom I was sharing a lot of that great cartoon history. (Young gents out there: the right kind of lady loves a literate man.)

Who is the genius behind all of this? None other than Larry Gonick, a Harvard mathematician who decided to draw cartoons about science and history. I'm going to focus entirely on his historical contributions here, but he's written similar guides to statistics, genetics, and many other topics. Pictured at right you can see my first editions as I collected them over the past two decades:

The Cartoon History of the Universe I, Vol. 1-7: From the Big Bang to Alexander the Great (1990)

The Cartoon History of the Universe II, Vol. 8-13: From the Springtime of China to the Fall of Rome (1994)

The Cartoon History of the Universe III, Vol. 14-19: From the Rise of Arabia to the Renaissance (2002)

The Cartoon History of the Modern World, Part 1: From Columbus to the U.S. Constitution (2006)

The Cartoon History of the Modern World, Part 2: From the Bastille to Baghdad (2009)

I hate that the books got smaller over time, but cost becomes an issue and these aren't exactly Spider-Man comics we're talking about. The quality and style has been consistent over the twenty years, and I've savored every minute that I've spent reading each of the five books. Things I love about these:

• Beautiful black and white pen and brush work reminiscent of Pogo and Asterix. Examples here, here, here, here, and here. These little images don't do the work justice.
  
• The books are heavily footnoted (with an amusing icon of a foot drawing an asterisk or a musical note). They also contain extensive bibliographies at the end, referencing both established works in the field as well as primary sources when applicable.
  
• While it's not possible to list every historical figure and the detail of every society on earth in a space that takes up less than 20 linear centimeters on the bookshelf, Gonick does a great job of covering histories that are frequently ignored in modern western life unless you choose to specialize. Namely the histories of China, India, the Middle East, and north Africa.
  
• There are big gaps. Only the briefest mentions are given to Russia, Korea, Thailand and the rest of southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Australia. South America drops off the radar around 1900. Antarctica also gets short shrift, but not much of significance has happened there. For my part, those gaps encourage me to do the research on my own.
  
• Because a truly comprehensive history of the world would have required a book for every modern nation, there are points at which Gonick draws a map of the world and gives a quick synopsis as to what is happening where. It's an easy way to get the "big picture" of a specific decade.
  
• If it's not already obvious, the whole endeavor was produced with a lot of love and humor. When was the last time you laughed while reading history? And for those of you who have reached the bottom of this post, desperate for food or wine content... He did a great series of cartoon recipes for Serious Eats.

Why do I bring all of this up now? These books will make great Christmas gifts for the curious youngster in your family. If you prefer a geocentric universe that began 6,000 years ago you probably won't like it, but if you want a kid to be able to intelligently argue about the ostracism of Themistocles or the politics of Byzantium at any point from sixth grade to grad school, these books are for you--or more appropriately, for that weird little relative that obsesses over dinosaurs, space, math, and eventually, wine. Though I'd prefer that you give it to the child with a few cracks in the spine and some dogeared pages. We could all use a refresher course in world history.

Bulk Wines

With old movies, I often find myself paying attention to background details, like the style of men's ties, typefaces, and historical curiosities.

Take this still from Charlie Chaplin's 1936 Modern Times. I've sharpened and adjusted the image somewhat, and it will be clearer to read if you click on the small photo to the right.

During an extended scene in a department store with the female lead in which our two impoverished protagonists pretend to be rich, the Little Tramp is chased into the liquor section. The sign at the top of the wall reads "Rare Old Wines in Bulk", with a smaller sign below that says "Take Home a Jug of our Guaranteed Wine". The barrels are labeled Pre-War Stock Muscatel, Choice Old Rum, Special Port Wine, Pre-War Stock Sauterne (sic), Sherry Wine, and the blocked barrel reads Angelica Wine, which is sort of a California Port made from the Mission grape. Presumably "Pre-War" is shorthand for "Pre-Prohibition".

I know in the European countryside it's common to run up to the local wine producer with a jug or a few spare bottles to stock up on table wine, but it's not something I've ever associated with American wine drinking. Moonshine yes, wine no.

I don't know a lot about how wine, fortified wine, and spirits were shipped and stored back in the 1930s, but one wonders about how the Sauternes and Muscatel would have tasted after spending roughly twenty years in oak barrels. The rum could have been amazing, though, and that's what gets sprayed in Charlie's face seconds after that screen capture above.

Image copyright Warner Home Video.