Lest we forget

War, huh, yeah, what is it good for? And a recipe for Anzac biscuit ice cream

War (huh, yeah)

What is it good for?

Absolutely nothing (uhhh)

This is a newsletter about food, so it’s probably the wrong place to be quoting Edwin Starr lyrics. But you know, Anzac Day, the world going to hell in a handcart… it puts me in a reflective state of mind. My generation has been so lucky. We learned about the Vietnam War from watching TV shows like Tour of Duty and China Beach, while World War II was something we studied at school. Both were in the distant, murky past for most people my age, but my parents were full of stories about ‘the war’, told from the perspective of the children and teenagers they’d been at the time. Dad’s stories were tinged with regret that the action had ended before he got to join the air force. Mum’s were more about the home front, about rationing and waiting for the telegram man.

Here’s my maternal grandfather Don Gordon, a Whanganui school principal and Territorial who was too old to be signing up for active service but did so anyway. He went off to war in 1939, was captured at Corinth and spent five years in a German POW camp.

My grandmother Myrtle, meanwhile, spent that time coping with rationing, raising three young children and not knowing whether her husband was ever coming back. A series of telegrams tell this short story in the briefest of snatches. It has a happy ending, of a sort, in that he eventually came home. He even got a bunch of medals, which seems like small consolation for losing five years of your life. He went back to teaching and life resumed, but I don’t think it was ever ‘normal’ again for him or my grandmother.

What’s all this got to do with food? Well, everything and nothing. I do my best thinking when I’m cooking, and every Anzac Day I think about my grandparents and great aunt and uncle who served in World War II. I think about my mother, who waved goodbye to her father when she was 10 and then welcomed him home again, nearly a stranger. I think about stories my mother told me about her tiny, bird-like granny moving in with them during the war, and how these brave, apparently very funny women kept everything going when they were probably beside themselves with white-hot dread.

There is no easy segue from war to ice cream. Except, perhaps, that life is short and fragile and we should make the most of its joys while we can.

Anzac Biscuit Ice Cream

This recipe IS a joy. It’s fun to make, but if making the Anzac crumble seems a bridge too far, you could just crush five or six Anzac biscuits up and stir them through the ice cream mixture as detailed below.

Makes about 750ml - easily enough for 4-6 because it’s very rich.

For the Anzac crumble:

50g butter

1/4 cup brown sugar

1 Tbsp golden syrup

1/4 cup rolled oats

1/4 cup desiccated coconut

1/4 cup plain flour

For the ice cream:

3 egg yolks

3/4 cup lightly packed brown sugar

1 Tbsp rum

375ml (1 1/2 cups) cream

Make the crumble first. Heat the oven to 180C and line a baking tray with a piece of baking paper measuring about 30cm by 30cm.

Melt the butter in a medium saucepan, then add the sugar and golden syrup. Stir well, then remove from the heat and add the oats, coconut and flour. Mix well, then tip onto the baking paper. Spread out in a thin, even layer and put in the oven for 7-10 minutes, until golden and bubbling. Set aside – it will harden as it cools. When it’s cold, make the ice cream.

Put the egg yolks and brown sugar in a bowl and beat (with electric beaters, unless you have forearms of steel) until pale and thick. Add the rum and beat again. Pour in the cream and beat until soft peaks form. Take about two-thirds of the Anzac mixture and crumble it over the top. Fold it in gently, then pour the whole mixture into a lidded plastic container. Freeze for at least four hours, until firm. Let it ripen out of the freezer for 10 minutes before scooping. Reserve the rest of the Anzac mixture to crumble over the top when you serve the icecream (or eat shards of it with a cup of tea as a cook’s perk).

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