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Graham Crackers
Take a pint of sweet cream, stir into it two even teaspoonfuls of baking powder and turn in enough Graham flour to make a stiff dough, knead well and beat well with the rolling pin, for half an hour, adding half a cupful of sugar if you wish them sweet. Roll very thin and cut into squares, and mark them with a fork or clock key. Let them stand half an hour, and bake fifteen minutes. The same quantity of milk with two tablespoonfuls of melted butter will do if you have not cream, a little salt, mix baking powder in the flour.
A DELICATE WAY TO COOK CALVES' LIVER.
Lay it on the meat board and scrape to remove the strings, after having done this place it in a dish with two beaten eggs. Salt and pepper, then drop it in a skellet with hot lard and butter, when nicely browned on one side turn it over, cook well and place it on a hot platter.
A cracker dough with no oven temperature and a beating time that reads like a misprint but is not. Note that a second, unrelated recipe for calves' liver has been run onto the end of the same paragraph, as often happened when compositors filled a column.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Crackers of this thinness want a moderate to moderately hot oven, 350-375F, for the fifteen minutes stated. Watch the edges rather than the clock; thin dough turns from pale to scorched quickly.
- A pint of creamTwo cups. Heavy cream is closer to nineteenth-century "sweet cream" in fat than today's light cream, but either works. "Sweet" here means unsoured, not sugared.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour milled with the bran and germ left in, named for Sylvester Graham. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the nearest thing; ordinary whole-wheat flour is finer but acceptable. Expect to need roughly 4 to 5 cups to reach a stiff dough.
- The half hour of beatingThis is the hinge. Repeated pounding with the rolling pin works the dough tight and is what gives an old-style cracker its dense, brittle snap rather than a biscuit crumb. A shorter session of folding and whacking will get part of the way there; skipping it entirely is likely to give a softer, cakier result.
- Baking powder in 1900Baking powder -- Period baking powder was probably weaker and less reliably double-acting than today's. Two teaspoons for this quantity of flour is modest by modern standards rather than generous, and the recipe's second version directs that it be mixed into the flour.
- Docking with a clock keyMarking with a clock key -- The fork or clock key stamps the dough; such marking also perforates it, letting steam escape so the crackers stay flatter. A fork tine or skewer does the same job.
- The half-hour restResting the rolled and cut squares relaxes the gluten so they do not shrink and curl in the oven. Do not skip it after all that beating.
- YieldTwo cups of cream plus that much flour makes a large batch, several dozen small crackers rolled genuinely thin. They keep well in a tin and can be re-crisped in a low oven.
- The liver recipeA separate dish. 'Skellet' is skillet, and lard can be replaced with any neutral fat. The instruction to 'cook well' reflects a period preference; cooked that far the texture turns grey and grainy.
Graham flour and everything made from it descend from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister and dietary reformer whose lectures of the 1830s urged unbolted wheat, cold water and plain living on an America he thought overstimulated by white bread and meat. By the time this book was compiled, the polemic had faded and the flour had simply become a pantry staple: coarse, nutty and cheap. A homemade graham cracker of this sort is nothing like the sweet, cinnamon-scented commercial version familiar today; the sugar is explicitly optional. The long beating with a rolling pin belongs to a cracker tradition in which ship's biscuit and water crackers were worked by hand, or later by a hinged 'cracker brake', until the dough was smooth and tight.