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French Crackers
One and a half pounds each of flour and sugar, three-fourths pound butter, whites of five eggs; before cooking wash over with egg and dip in sugar.
A terse ingredient list in the old style, with the method assumed. This is a stiff, unleavened sugar biscuit rolled thin and baked crisp, and the handling matters more than anything in the list.
- The hinge: work it dry and roll it thinThere is no liquid here but five egg whites, so the dough will look very dry before it comes together under the hands and the rolling pin. The recipe gives no thickness; for a cracker, thin (in the region of 1/8 inch) is the usual modern reading, and adding water or milk would change the character of the thing.
- Quantities in cupsOne and a half pounds of flour is roughly 5 1/2 cups; the same weight of granulated sugar is about 3 1/3 cups; three-quarters pound of butter is three sticks. Weighing is far more reliable than measuring here, since the dough has so little margin.
- Yield, and why you should scale downAs written this makes a very large batch -- several dozen thin crackers at least -- which suited a household baking for the week. Quartering everything brings it down to roughly one egg white and a manageable tray or two.
- No oven temperature is givenThe recipe says nothing about the oven. A moderate oven, around 350F, for roughly 8 to 12 minutes depending on thickness is a reasonable modern starting point. They are done when the edges just take colour; they crisp as they cool, so pulling them pale is correct.
- No leavening, and that is deliberateThere is no saleratus, soda or baking powder in the list. Adding any will puff the crackers and defeat the point, which is a dense, snapping biscuit.
- The wash and sugar dip"Wash over with egg" is not further specified; beaten whole egg or the yolks left over from the dough would both answer. The sugar dip then sets into a crackled crust. Coarse or granulated sugar rather than fine, pressed on lightly, holds best.
- Butter temperatureThe butter needs to be soft enough to rub or cream into the flour and sugar without melting. Cold butter will leave the dough crumbly past the point of rescue given how little moisture there is.
"Cracker" in nineteenth-century American usage meant simply a thin hard biscuit, sweet or plain, baked dry rather than soft, and a great many household books carried sweet crackers alongside the soda and water sorts. Calling them French is often said to have been shorthand of the period for anything richer or more refined than the plain domestic version, in this case the butter and the sugared crust, though the explanation is traditional rather than documented. The extreme brevity of the entry is characteristic of Buckeye Cookery, which gathered contributions from Ohio housewives who assumed their readers already knew how to make up a dough, roll it, cut it and judge a moderate oven. Recipes of this kind were presumably meant to keep in a tin, which may be much of why they were worth making in pound quantities.