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Cracknells
To one pint of rich milk put two ounces butter and spoon of yeast. Make it warm, and mix enough fine flour to make a light dough; roll thin and cut in long pieces, two inches broad. Prick well, and bake in slow oven. - Effie A. Adams, Quincy, Ills.
A yeast-raised cracker rather than a soft tea cake — the point is a dry, brittle biscuit, and everything in the method is bent toward driving out moisture.
- The hinge: bake dry, not brownCracknells are done when they are crisp all the way through and barely coloured. Pulling them at the point where an ordinary biscuit would look right leaves a leathery centre that softens within an hour.
- "Slow oven"Roughly 300F, and lower is defensible here.
- "Spoon of yeast"This means a spoonful of liquid barm or homemade yeast, which has no reliable modern equivalent. About 1 teaspoon of instant or one 2 1/4-teaspoon packet of active dry yeast will raise this quantity of dough; expect the original to have been slower and more sour.
- QuantitiesA pint is 2 cups of milk; 2 ounces of butter is half a stick. "Enough fine flour" for a light dough works out around 5 to 6 cups of all-purpose, kneaded until smooth and not slack.
- "Make it warm"Warm the milk and butter together to about 105-110F before adding the yeast — hot enough to start it, not hot enough to kill it. The butter need not fully melt.
- Roll thinner than feels rightAn eighth of an inch or less. Anything thicker will stay soft in the middle no matter how long it dries.
- Why prick wellDocking with a fork keeps the yeast dough from ballooning into pillows in the oven. Prick right through the sheet, and prick again after cutting if the pieces have puffed while resting.
- Yield and keepingRoughly three to four dozen strips two inches wide. Cooled completely and stored airtight, they keep for a couple of weeks; they are meant to be eaten with butter, cheese or tea rather than fresh from the oven.
"Cracknell" comes into English from the French craquelin, by way of Middle Dutch, and the name is often said to echo the sound of the thing hat snsnaps. English cracknells were often parboiled before baking to gloss the surface, a trick this version skips in favour of straightforward rolling, docking and slow drying. It appears among the breakfast and tea cakes of Buckeye Cookery (1877), in the company of crackers, rusks and zwieback — keeping goods that lasted for weeks in a tin when soft bread would not. The attribution to a contributor in Quincy, Illinois is typical of the book, which was assembled from recipes sent in by its readers.