Crackers
One large coffee cup bread dough. When very light roll it out, and spread in it a piece of butter and lard together as large as a goose egg, dredge a little flour over it, and fold it up and pound with a rolling pin about fifteen minutes. After this is done, roll out very thin, and cut out with a large cake cutter. Stamp with a clock key, which should be kept for this purpose. Bake in a hot oven quickly, then put them in the heater to dry, and crisp, leave them there for several hours.
This is a beaten cracker built on leftover bread dough, laminated with fat and dried rather than simply baked. The pounding is the whole point, not a quaint flourish.
- The hinge: the poundingFifteen minutes of whacking with a rolling pin develops gluten and drives out the gas, giving a dense, flaky sheet rather than a bread. A food processor with the dough blade, run in bursts, will work the dough hard, but it will not give the layering that the pin and the folding do. Skip the stage and you get flatbread.
- One large coffee cup of doughNineteenth-century coffee cups varied and were often smaller than a modern measuring cup, so read this as about a cupful of risen dough, perhaps 6-8 oz. Any lean white bread dough at full proof works.
- Butter and lard as large as a goose eggA goose egg is around three times the size of a hen's egg, so somewhere in the region of 4-5 oz of fat, split between the two. Lard gives the shortness and butter the flavour; all butter works, though the crackers are likely to be less crisp.
- A hot oven, quickly425-450F, and only until the crackers are set and faintly coloured -- roughly 8 to 10 minutes at 1/8 inch thick. They should not brown much at this stage.
- Stamp with a clock keyThe winding key of a mantel clock would leave a small ring-shaped impression, and may well have pierced the dough as it did so. The likely purpose is docking: keeping the crackers from puffing into pillows. A fork, a skewer, or the end of a chopstick does the same job.
- The heaterThe warming closet of a coal range, holding somewhere around 150-200F. The modern equivalent is an oven at its lowest setting with the door propped ajar, or a dehydrator. Several hours there is what turns a thin biscuit into something that snaps and keeps.
- YieldNot given in the original. From a cup of dough rolled thin, expect about two dozen crackers cut with a 2 1/2 to 3 inch cutter.
- StorageFully dried, they keep for weeks in a tin. If they soften, ten minutes in a 300F oven restores them.
Crackers of this kind belong to the family of beaten biscuits and ship's bread -- unleavened or barely leavened doughs made workable by physical force rather than by yeast or chemical raising. Before commercially made crackers became a grocery staple -- and they were sold from barrels well before the boxed trade of the later nineteenth century -- a household that baked its own bread had dough to spare, and turning a cupful into crackers was thrift as much as cookery. The pounding stage is the giveaway that this is an older technique: the same fifteen or thirty minutes with a rolling pin or a mallet, and, if recollection is to be believed, sometimes the flat of an axe head, appears in Southern beaten-biscuit recipes well into the twentieth century, and hand-cranked biscuit brakes were sold for exactly this labour. The instruction to stamp with a clock key, kept for the purpose, is a small portrait of a kitchen where tools were improvised from whatever the house already owned.