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Soda Crackers
1/2 Yeast Cake, 1½ quart Flour, 1/2 oz. Salt, ¼ cup sour Milk or Water, 1 scant pt. warm Water, 1/3 cup Lard, 1 teaspoonful The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda.
In the evening set sponge of yeast, warm water and flour (sifted). Let raise over night. In the morning work into it the lard, salt and The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda, dissolved in the sour milk, or water. Work all well together, using enough more sifted flour to make a stiff dough. Pound with rolling pin and double over. Keep repeating until dough is smooth. Then roll out into a thin sheet and punch holes into it with a large fork. Cut out round or square and bake on cookie tins or in large dripping pans. Bake in hot oven. It takes but a few minutes to bake them. Have pans heated before putting the crackers on them and do not grease them.
A yeasted, laminated soda cracker built over two sessions: an overnight sponge, then a morning dough beaten smooth with a rolling pin. The pounding is the whole technique, and nothing substitutes for it.
- The hinge: pound, fold, repeatThe rolling-pin beating works and folds the dough — it develops gluten and builds thin layers that blister in the oven. The recipe gives no time, only a sign: repeat until the dough is smooth and no longer tears. That working is what separates a cracker from a flatbread, and it is hard to reproduce by simply mixing the dough.
- Yeast cakeHalf a compressed yeast cake is roughly 1 teaspoon of active dry or instant yeast. Compressed cake yeast is still sold refrigerated in some markets, in 0.6 oz cubes; half a cube is close to the intent.
- Flour by volumeA quart and a half of sifted flour is about 6 cups, or roughly 24-30 oz depending on how it is measured, and the recipe then asks for more. Treat the stated amount as a starting point and go by feel: the finished dough should be stiff enough to resist the pin.
- "A hot oven"425-450F. Preheat the sheets in it as directed and slide the crackers onto the hot, ungreased metal; that initial blast is what puffs and dries them. Four to seven minutes is typical, and they go from pale to scorched quickly.
- Soda and sour milkThe Arm & Hammer soda is plain baking soda, and the quarter cup of sour milk is its acid — real soured milk when this was written, so use buttermilk today. If you use water instead, as the recipe permits, the soda mostly acts on the acidity built up by the overnight sponge.
- LardA third of a cup of leaf lard gives the shortest, most tender crumb; butter works but browns faster, and shortening is neutral. Whatever you use, work it into the risen sponge rather than the flour.
- Docking the sheetThe holes punched with a fork are structural, not decorative — they let steam escape so the cracker stays flat and crisp instead of ballooning into a pocket.
- Yield and keepingThis makes a large batch. Cool them completely on a rack; any trapped warmth softens them. They keep a week or more in a tin and can be re-crisped for a few minutes in a low oven.
Soda crackers were a staple of the American cracker barrel long before they were a factory product, and recipes like this one may show the home version around the time it was beginning to be displaced — the National Biscuit Company's sealed-package Uneeda Biscuit appeared in 1898 and made buying crackers easier than beating them. The overnight sponge is the older half of the method, inherited from bread; the pinch of soda is the newer half, added both to lighten the dough and to neutralize the acidity that develops in a long ferment, which is exactly the argument Church & Dwight was making for its product in booklets like this one. These promotional recipe pamphlets, given away with the boxes, were a standard way to teach cooks new uses for a branded chemical leavener — the practice ran from the nineteenth century well into the twentieth, and this booklet carries no date — and the trademark is worked into the ingredient list as advertising as much as instruction. The modern saltine, holes and all, is the same cracker on a conveyor belt.