Vegan Anzac Biscuits

A longer and more detailed description

Bless this recipe. After last week’s debacle with the lavash, I needed a reaffirmation that I can, in fact, bake. This incredibly simple recipe is exactly that sort of culinary hug my ego needed.

It’s worth calling out that this set of ingredients, more than usual, reflects that I am cooking in the Netherlands. Several of the ingredients I list here are either not available outside the Netherlands, or have more accurate Australian substitutes that I chose not to explore because I thought the Dutch ingredients better fit what I was looking for. For everyone not in the Netherlands, don’t worry. The substitutions section will explain what ingredients I used, what Australian ingredients they’re subbing in for, and what you could use instead to make some pretty fantabulous cookies.

I’ll also preface this by saying that this is not a complicated recipe. It is, in fact, one of the simplest recipes I’ve done in this series. There is lots of room to explore with minimal risk of messing up. Be creative! Explore your cookie potential!

We’ll start by preparing our liquid. In a measuring cup - or bowl or pot or mouth or whatever, I’m not your mother - mix your boiling water with your stroop and baking soda. Add your butter, and then set them all aside to get to know one another intimately.

We’re then sifting together the flour and ginger. You could, I suppose, do this in basically any container, but I recommend a mixing bowl. Besides, sifting in a mixing bowl is a deeply satisfying experience. You get to watch the little bits of powders dance and intermingle in this wild and frantic dance. With every shake, they shuffle partners, whirling and gliding against one another in this constant jostle of rhythm and noise. It’s wonderous.

Ruin it by adding macadamia nuts, coconut, oats, and cardamom. These ingredients do not dance, but mix them in anyway. We shall eat them for their crimes.

Once all dry ingredients are mixed, add in your wet ingredients, creating a mad orgy of nuts, oats, and mysterious liquidy substances. Mix these together, creating a clumpy, dry dough. You may, at this point, choose to poke in a finger to taste how the dough is doing. You should know that this will be deceptive - the coconut cooks down surprisingly nicely.

Use your tablespoon to scoop the cookie dough on to your waiting cookie sheet. Spread your cookies out and flatten them slightly using either your spoon (if you’re boring), your fingers (if you’re fun), or the underside of the cookie sheet (if you want to make a mess instead of cookies). Pop these in the oven until they turn golden brown, or around 12-15 minutes. Remember to pull them out when they’re golden brown, then let them sit and harden for a few minutes before devouring. Enjoy!

Substitutions and suggestions

For the cane sugar: Dutch cane sugar can best be described as midway between white and brown sugar. It has more molasses than standard white sugar, but less than brown sugar. In this recipe in particular, it’s filling in for castor sugar, which is a fine-grained British white sugar that I couldn’t find. For a more traditional Australian biscuit, I’d recommend taking some ordinary white sugar, giving it a few puffs through a blender, and rolling with that. However, I really enjoyed my darker flavoured biscuits. For these, you may want to try a half and half mixture of white and brown sugar.

For the stroop: Stroop here is filling in for Australian golden syrup, which I also could not find. Golden syrup is essentially refined sugarcane juice, whereas stroop is made from sugar beets. If you want the lighter flavour of golden syrup, agave nectar is a good replacement, as is a very light maple syrup. Stroop, however, is more akin to a dark maple syrup or molasses. I prefer the dark flavour, but again, your kitchen, your rules.

For the vegan butter: Use whatever brings you joy, preferably palm oil free. :)

For the macadamia nuts: Macadamia nuts are not ordinarily part of an Anzac biscuit; however, I thought they’d be a really nice touch and highlight the Australian-ness of the recipe. I was right. You do not, however, have to add macadamia nuts. The cookies are fine without them.

What I changed to make it vegan

I literally picked out a butter with the word “vegan” on it instead of one with a picture of a cow.

A brief context for this dish

The culinary tradition of Australia stretches back at least 65000 years, to Aboriginal traditions now known as “bush tucker.” These traditions evolved and adapted to take advantage of Australia’s massive biodiversity. Aboriginal people cultivated foods, helped spread crops throughout the continent, and traded and interacted with one another, sharing their culinary traditions with one another in a complex web of trade and culture. Many of these indigenous foods still play a role in modern Australian cuisine, such as kangaroo meat, quandongs, bush tomatoes, and Tasmanian peppers. Indeed, indigenous Australian ingredients have become more and more prevalent throughout Australian cuisine, seeing a resurgence as colonisers rediscover what Aboriginal Australians already knew - Australia hosts a wealth of unique edible plants.

When I looked for an Australian recipe to make, I checked bush tucker recipes first, seeing what they comprised of and if I could make them work. Most of the ingredients in these recipes, however, are unknown outside Australia, and so, if I wanted to make them, I’d have been making so many substitutions that the authenticity of the dish would be entirely compromised. Instead, I went with the one plant that has seen mass export from Australia, and which I could find in my local supermarket, and added it in to a dish that, in many ways, is also a reflection of the unique relationship Australia has with its colonial history.

Macadamia nuts are originally native to Australia, specifically to what is now New South Wales and Queensland. There, it played a role in Aboriginal societies such as the Budjilla, serving not only as an important source of protein, but also as a liniment and face paint. It, like many other Australian foodstuffs, was traded between groups, and travelled with people as they migrated from place to place.

When Europeans encountered macadamias, however, they didn’t fully appreciate what it was they had found. Macadamias were not cultivated by Europeans until the 1860s - though Aboriginal Australians had been cultivating them for millennia prior to Europeans’ arrival - and did not find commercial success until their export to Hawaii in the 1880s. There, they were initially cultivated as windbreaks for sugar cane plantations before finding success in their own right.

Macadamias are themselves almost a symbol of Australia. Of the myriad of foods available on the continent, it is macadamias that have somehow found mainstream success, and then, mainly by hitching themselves to the wagon of more lucrative crops. They are a plant that has been a staple for millennia, but which is now more consumed by Americans than Australians.

Adding macadamias to one of the other enduring symbols of Australian colonialism seems fitting, and brings me to what an Anzac biscuit actually is.

Dutch explorers first mapped Australia in 1606, and continued to explore and chart it throughout the early 17th century (many Australian places still bear Dutch names, such as Tasmania, as does New Zealand). However, the Dutch and many other colonising European powers saw no particular value in colonising Australia, believing it to be a desolate wasteland too far from Europe to ever recoup an investment. It wasn’t until Great Britain lost its colonies in the Americas that it decided a colony in Australia would be worth the investment, albeit as a penal colony. In 1779, a British penal colony was established in Botany Bay. Over the next century, over a hundred thousand convicts would be transported from Great Britain to Australia, left there to fend for themselves and build a working society. Much like across the rest of the British Empire, these white settlers encountered the Aboriginal population, leading to epidemics, war, and genocide.

Throughout the story of conquest, however, lies the narrative of survival, both on the part of Aborigines and European settlers. For Aborigines, survival meant navigating the new and complex world of being pushed out of their traditional hunting grounds and surviving plague and massacre. For European colonisers, survival meant adapting European traditions to a new world.

Anzac biscuits represent this European adaptation. Though they gained fame during WWI, their history spans close to the entire history of British colonisation of Australia. The first documented evidence of an oat cookie resembling Anzac biscuits comes from 1823, and, much like its descendent, served a similar role of being a cookie that was durable and could be eaten well after its initial baking. This version, however, is lacking the trademark coconut. As Australian and New Zealand soldiers were shipped off to Gallipoli during WWI, the name of the biscuits shifted, becoming known instead as “Red Cross biscuits” or “Anzac biscuits.” These were baked by wives, sisters, and mothers, and shipped to Europe to help give Australian and New Zealand soldiers a taste of home. However, it’s not until 1924 that the first coconut appears in the recipe, creating what we know as the modern Anzac biscuit.

To say that the Anzac biscuit remains a part of Australian national culture is a bit of an understatement. Anzac biscuits are protected by law, to the point where a significant deviation from the traditional recipe is a prosecutable offence (so my apologies in advance to the nation of Australia, please don’t ban me, I would still like to pet a quokka). While we’ve spoken about the influence colonialism has had on national cuisines in cases like Antigua and Barbuda and Angola, I find the case of Australia particularly interesting. The Anzac biscuit is unquestionably a product of Australia’s colonial past, and it - and the ANZAC Corps more generally - are a source of national pride, albeit a controversial one.

It’s the differing relationship with a colonial past that I find interesting. The ANZAC Corps was formed in response to WWI, with soldiers being sent to fight in Gallipoli. There, nearly half of them died, with war correspondents commentating on the bravery of the Australian soldiers and the incompetence of the British commanders. However, Australians as a whole still thought of themselves as varyingly British, with the country not gaining legislative independence until 1942, and not gaining total independence until 1986. Anzac biscuits are representative of that sense of commonality with British colonisers, even after Australia had become its own nation with its own identity. That identity was forged with consideration of where the majority of Australia’s population had come from, and a continued sense of community with it.

Anzac biscuits represent part of what it means to be a white Australian. They include that connection to the past, to Australian soldiers dying on far-off European battlefields, and of continuing to celebrate Australian bravery. The addition of macadamia nuts serves as a way to add in that voice that was crushed to make that European identity, the Aborigines who faced genocide in the name of manifest destiny. It is Australian, in all the complexity that that term implies.