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Browned Crackers (Spread one dozen Saltines)
Spread one dozen Saltines with butter; sprinkle with a few grains cayenne. Brown delicately in a hot oven; serve at once.
A soup accompaniment that takes four minutes and is ruined in five. The only real skill is watching the oven.
- Oven temperatureA "hot oven" in books of this period is usually read as somewhere around 400-450F. At that heat a buttered saltine colors in only a few minutes, so stay at the door rather than setting a timer.
- "Brown delicately"The instruction is doing real work. You want the butter absorbed and the edges just gold; past that the cracker's own soda flavor turns bitter and scorched, and there is no recovering it.
- ButterSoftened, not melted. Melted butter runs off the cracker onto the sheet and burns there. Spread it thin enough that the cracker's dimples still show.
- "A few grains cayenne"Literally that: a pinch between finger and thumb over a dozen crackers, not a pinch each. Err low.
- Saltines then and nowThe saltine of this book's period was a plain soda cracker; brands and salting vary, so if your crackers are already heavily salted on top, skip any additional salt entirely.
- Pan and handlingBake on a bare sheet in a single layer. They crisp further as they cool for a minute and soften as they sit, which may well be the point of the original's "serve at once."
- YieldA dozen is roughly four servings alongside soup, fewer if they are put out with drinks. Scale by the sheet rather than crowding one pan.
52 Sunday Dinners belongs to a wave of early twentieth-century American menu books that planned a household's week rather than offering isolated recipes, and small items like this one exist to fill out a course. The saltine itself is a soda cracker — leavened with bicarbonate, docked with holes, baked hard for keeping — and by the time this book appeared it was a nationally branded, boxed grocery staple rather than something a cook made at home. Warming and buttering crackers to serve with soup is an older habit than the packaged cracker, and is often linked to the hard ship's biscuit and the cracker barrel, though that line of descent is more tradition than documented fact. The cayenne is the period's standard gesture toward a "piquant" savory: American cookery around 1900 used it in tiny quantities in cheese straws, oyster dishes and canapés, less for heat than for a faint sharpness at the back of a bland mouthful.