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Egg Crackers
Six eggs, twelve table-spoons sweet milk, six table-spoons butter, half tea-spoon soda; mold with flour half an hour, and roll thin.- Mrs. J. S. Robinson.
A cracker dough in the old style: stiff, egg-rich, and worked far longer than any modern biscuit. The recipe gives no flour weight, no oven temperature and no baking time, so the technique has to carry it.
- Flour is undeclared"Mold with flour" means work in as much as the dough will take until it is stiff and dry to the touch, and there is no way to recover the writer's exact figure. Expect somewhere in the region of 4 to 5 cups for six eggs and twelve tablespoons of milk, added gradually.
- Twelve table-spoonsTwelve tablespoons of milk is 3/4 cup; six tablespoons of butter is 3/4 of a stick, roughly 85 g. Nineteenth-century tablespoons may have run a little larger than the modern 15 ml measure, but not enough to matter in a dough worked to feel.
- "Mold" means knead, and half an hour is the pointThe long working develops the gluten that gives a cracker its snap; a few minutes' work will give a softer, more biscuit-like result. A stand mixer with a dough hook will shorten the job, though no exact equivalent time can be given.
- The soda has nothing to work onHalf a teaspoon of soda with sweet (fresh) milk and no acid will not raise the dough much; what it chiefly does is help the crackers brown. Do not substitute baking powder expecting lift.
- Roll genuinely thinAbout 1/8 inch or less. Prick each cracker all over with a fork before baking or it will puff into a hollow pillow rather than staying flat and crisp.
- OvenNone is given. A moderate oven, around 350°F, for 12 to 15 minutes, until the crackers are pale gold and dry through; they crisp further as they cool. A hotter oven risks coloring them before the center dries.
- Yield and keepingThe yield depends on how much flour the dough takes, but a batch of this size will run to several dozen 2-inch crackers. Cool completely and store airtight; if they soften, five minutes in a low oven restores them.
Buckeye Cookery (Ohio, 1877) belongs to the era when crackers were still a household product rather than a boxed one, and this recipe sits at the point where the two overlapped. Egg crackers were the richer end of a family that ran from ship's biscuit and hardtack through soda and butter crackers: flour, a fat, a liquid, and a great deal of arm work. The half-hour of molding is not fussiness but the whole method, and larger bakeries of the period used a cracker brake, a hinged roller that folded and pressed the dough repeatedly, to accomplish the same thing. Contributions like Mrs. J. S. Robinson's are what the book is made of; it was compiled by Estelle Woods Wilcox from contributed recipes, which is why the instructions assume a cook who already knows what a finished cracker dough feels like.