And so, as I conclude this sojourn, and wrap up some thoughts before handing the speckled dish on to my friend Kathi, maybe you are asking “Why Anzac cookies?”

Well, apart from the fact that they taste good, keep well, and bear a direct relationship to Maureen’s Scottish flapjack recipe in the previous sojourn, I actually have another reason for wanting to post the Anzac cookie recipe.

About a year ago, a can full of these cookies baked by me, Janna and her friend Olivia, headed south by mail to Mississippi. They were bound for an army base, where the fiancé of a former Dartmouth student of mine was preparing to ship out to Iraq. He, like so many young people these days, joined the army to pay for graduate school, and not realizing, perhaps, how fast we’d be mired once again in the Middle East, found himself all too soon far from home and his wife to be, among people who didn’t necessarily share his artistic view on life (he was the unit’s photographer.) When my former student described Dolphin’s* plight and suggested that we might like to send him a care package, naturally these cookies came to mind. Knowing the history of the Anzac biscuit, I was confident that they would survive the heat, the Army, and anything else that could befall them before Dolphin received our package, and I hoped that the cookies’ admirable survival techniques would rub off on him.

I’m happy to report that Dolphin did receive the cookies and they were a great success with him and with his unit. (He graciously shared a few). In the months that followed, we didn’t hear much from him, but I knew he must be OK because he had left fortified by the biscuits of warriors. And sure enough, we received quite recently, the happy news that he had returned home safe and sound, with photos showing men from his unit making friends with some Iraqi kids.

When I bake Anzac cookies, I always think of those First World War soldiers from Australia and New Zealand, who left home to fight in a war in a part of the world that must have seemed so incredibly remote from home. That generation of soldiers in the Great War were young men in their twenties, for the most part, fighting for a motherland that most of them had never seen—fighting for a world that was soon to disappear, and for what? So that they, like their European counterparts, could be mown down like grass on the beaches of Gallipoli, or die of blood poisoning on the island of Skyros, or be suffocated by poison gas in the trenches in France, and leave just a handful of memorable poems, or photographs or, in the case of my grandfather—one of the lucky ones who did return home to his motherland—a few, faded letters describing not the horrors of war, but the sound of nightingales singing in the trees.

Maureen gave me the task of writing on the theme of thoughts about home in this sojourn, and I’m grateful to her for raising a subject that sounds simple enough on the surface, but which, more than anything, connects us to all that is most strongly experienced in our lives. It seems fitting, somehow, that the most mundane of everyday things, an enamel plate, with home baked cookies on it, should not just make me want to think of home, but to remember all those who have to leave it—often without much faith that they will return. But it is, nonetheless, proof of the importance of such simple things—these things that sustain, these things that can travel the miles between the familiar and the unimaginable—these things that connect despite difference, despite strife.

A package from home—can you imagine the moment at which the gift is received? The simple thing that is the speckled plate of cookies—well, first you have to open the can and breathe in that unique scent as you do. The powerful smell of Anzac cookies hits you right away—they could have arrived fresh from your mother’s kitchen this morning. The taste of oats, coconut, syrup, and the slightly fizzy taste of the baking soda as it rushes like a wave across your tongue—this is simply home, in and of itself. So the women who baked for their Anzac soldiers, who cleverly invented a cookie that would withstand all the vagaries of the long journey to war, were not just sending their men nourishment. I think they understood very well that they were also sending their men home.

• Name changed to protect the innocent, although Dolphin’s real name did come about as a result of being born on the night of a particularly important game between two NFL teams. Fortunately for him, the team with the least controversial name won.