Hard Tacks and Bully Beef: A critic’s harsh review of what the Anzacs really ate

REAL Anzac biscuits like bricks and tinned meat like dog food — we cook up an Anzac ration and put it to the taste test. ANZAC DAY SERVICE GUIDE

IT’S time for the real Anzac biscuit to take a bow as the food hero of the Gallipoli campaign.

Not the one we cook every April as Anzac Day rolls around, but the biscuit our soldiers ate at the front lines of World War 1 on the hills above Anzac Cove and in the trenches of France’s Western Front.

The modern version, all gooey with oats, coconut and golden syrup, glamorises the genuine article and skews how we imagine those soldiers survived the battlefield.

To get closer to that truth in a food sense, I went back to the records and, using recipes from the Australian War Memorial, British Imperial War Museum and historic cookbooks, baked and braised what the Anzacs had to eat day in day out.

Everything starts with the real army biscuit, or what was known as an Anzac Tile or Hard Tack.

They’re not sweet, chewy treats, that’s for sure. They’re a long-life, rock-hard rusk made from flour, water, milk powder, sugar and salt, rationed at about 450 gm daily for each man. And they’re bloody tough going.

They were known by troops as “molar breakers” after reportedly cracking many an infantryman’s teeth, but they were a good source of carbohydrate and energy, according to nutrition experts like accredited dietitian Tania Ferraretto.

I tried to chew one, and it was surprisingly sweet and wholemealy, but at potentially $1500 for a new dental crown, I chickened out going all the way. At their most basic they’re simply too tough to eat straight up.

Often soldiers ground or smashed them into rough “dust” to make porridge or to thicken another regular trench dish, bully beef stew. That was the next army chef invention test.

Breakfast gruel is possible after pounding one biscuit with a kitchen mallet and adding boiling water with a teaspoon of milk powder. It tastes like a poor man’s weet-bix, and is, well, at least edible.

Another biscuit went into a stew, but that’s where the food goes rapidly downhill.

Let’s start with the core ingredient of corned beef in a tin. Amazingly you can still buy a very similar product at most supermarkets, but take care as the salt content is outrageously high — between 780-1010mg per 100 gm serve.

Once out of the can it looks like dog food., smells like dog food, and tastes like, well, I can’t believe it’s not dog food. In fact, it tastes disgusting. Over fatty, over salty and texturally mushy. Bad all around.

Surely a stew from it can only be better. Using a combination of directions from a couple of war museums, old books and loosely based on an old Irish Hotpot recipe, I fried off in butter a handful each of chopped onion, carrot and potato before adding a can of bully and a jug of stock and gravy powder, simmering to cook through with a crushed biscuit to thicken.

It was a horrible grey mess. It smelled like dog’s vomit, and tasted only marginally better. I cooked this — and it’s pure muck.

Luckily celebrated official WW1 war correspondent and food critic Charles Bean wasn’t around to score me — he was brutal, describing similar trench food as “over-salted bully, which in the heat of midday or afternoon slipped in its own fat across the platter or mess tin, swamping stray flies as it went.”

There were occasional additions to the Anzac diet, like bacon or cheese, but fortunately they stayed off this menu, given Bean’s war diary review.

Greasy from exposure to the sun, it filled the dugout with “an odour sickeningly reminiscent of that exhaling from the corpses in No Man’s Land.”

Ouch. If only a dessert course could redeem such a disaster.

Can anyone bake me up a batch of sweet and sticky Anzac biscuits ...

This is the original Anzac Biscuit

Anzac Tile (aka Hard Tack)

Makes 6 biscuits

200gm (1.5 cups) plain self raising flour

400gm (3 cups) self-raising wholemeal flour

40gm (5 Tbs) sugar

20gm (3Tbs) milk powder

Good pinch salt

220mls water.

Mix in a large bowl and blend with your fingers the flours, sugar and milk powder. Dissolve salt in water and add, thoroughly working it all together into a dough. Tear it apart into balls then thrown back together several times until you have a hard dough. Rest for 30 minutes then roll into 8mm thick sheets using a rolling pin. Cut in 90mm squares pressing with a steel rule rather than slicing with a knife -the pressing helps to seal the edges and improve the bake. Dock the biscuits by pressing a regular pattern of tiny holes into each tile using a flat-end pin, rod or satay stick, pushing to the bottom, twisting and removing. Each tile should have an even 5x5 to 7x7 pattern. Place about 6mm apart on a lightly greased baking sheet and use remaining dough to form a border around the edges to stop tiles sides burning. Bake in a 200C oven for 30-45 mins, taking care not to burn. Store in an airtight container for a long time.

Recipe courtesy of the AWM

Originally published as Hard Tacks and Bully Beef: A critic’s harsh review of what the Anzacs really ate