About this time of year, golden syrup runs out of stock on supermarket shelves as people rush to bake Anzac biscuits — but here’s something to give you pause for thought.

An unopened tin of homemade Anzac biscuits sits in storage at the Australian War Memorial, a gift from a mother to a son that was never opened because Lance Corporal Terence Edward Hendle was mortally wounded in Vietnam the day he received them.

It’s a heart-breaking story but an important one to remember as we get distracted by trivial ‘soft versus crunchy’ debates over Anzac biscuits. These iconic biscuits — originally called Anzac tiles or wafers — were a hard, sugar-less substitute for bread.

Diggers had no choice between ‘soft’ or ‘crunchy’, it was just rock-hard biscuits that were long-life rations. There were no sugar-free or gluten-free variations, original Anzac wafers were made for survival.

So, this sealed biscuit tin that will never be opened — one of 1.5 million items in the Australian War Memorial collection — is a bitter-sweet reminder of the cost of war.

Lance Corporal Hendle received the biscuits on the day he was mortally wounded (29 November 1966) and died of his wounds in the early hours of the following morning, while on the operating table.

The biscuits were returned to his mother, who never opened the tin. In the years following, Mrs Hendle moved house 32 times and always made sure that “Terry’s bikkies” were carried on her lap with great care in the car on the way to her new home.

So, the next time you go shopping for desiccated coconut and rolled oats, spare a thought for the sobering story behind the recipe, no matter how unpalatable it is.

To give you an idea of the actual taste of the original Anzac biscuit, soldiers often had to devise ingenious methods to make them easier to eat. A kind of porridge could be made by grating them and adding water, or biscuits could be soaked in water and, with jam added, baked over a fire into jam tarts.

Surprisingly, the unopened tin of Anzac biscuits isn’t the only edible item stored in the Australian War Memorial’s collection — there’s a whole range of hardtack biscuits from the First World War.

So durable are they that soldiers used them not just for food, but for creative, non-culinary purposes. The texture and hardness of the biscuits meant that diggers could write personal messages on them and send them long distances to family, friends and loved ones.

Diggers also used the biscuits as paint canvases and even as photo frames (pictured), which features wool and bullets to create a picture frame. Another one in the Australian War Memorial’s collection was used as a Christmas card and has a tropical scene painted on it.

Sadly, there are too many war relics to fit in the Australian War Memorial’s galleries (there are 5,905 items currently on public display) and the collection continues to grow by about 20,000 items a year.

Let’s hope that no more unopened biscuit tins will ever join the collection again. Lest we forget.

The following recipe has been supplied courtesy of Arnott’s Biscuits Limited. awm.gov.au/articles/encyclopedia/anzac/biscuit/recipe