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Butter Crackers
Rub 4 ounces butter into 1 pound Five Roses flour. When well mixed, add enough cold water to dampen and add 1 teaspoon salt. Beat with rolling pin until smooth, then roll thin, cut into small cakes, and bake on tins in quick oven for 15 minutes. Let each cracker be about the size of a dollar piece and nearly ½ inch thick.
A beaten dough closer to English water biscuits than to anything from a modern cracker box. The whole character comes from the pounding, not from any leavening.
- The hinge: beating replaces yeastThere is no baking powder or soda here, so the only lift comes from steam and from the layers you build by folding and pounding the dough with the rolling pin. Beat, fold, beat again for a good ten to fifteen minutes until the dough is satiny and blistered; a slack, under-beaten dough bakes into a hard slab.
- Weights1 pound of flour is about 3 1/2 cups scooped and levelled, though weighing is far more reliable for a dough this stiff. 4 ounces of butter is one American stick, half a cup.
- "Enough cold water to dampen"Expect roughly 3/4 cup, added a spoonful at a time. The dough should be distinctly firm and dry, not tacky, or the beating will simply smear it.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400-425F. At that heat the recipe's 15 minutes is about as long as crackers this size will want; start checking at 10 and pull them when they are pale gold and dry through.
- The size of a dollar pieceA silver dollar is about 1 1/2 inches across. Half an inch thick sounds heavy, but these are meant to puff and hollow slightly, ending up light and short rather than wafer-thin.
- DockingPrick each round two or three times with a fork before baking. Undocked, the layers balloon into a pocket and the cracker collapses unevenly as it cools.
- Yield and keepingAround 50 to 60 crackers. They crisp as they cool, and if they soften after a day or two, five minutes in a 300F oven brings them back.
Butter crackers belong to the beaten-dough family that also produced the Southern beaten biscuit and the English ship's biscuit: no chemical leavening, no yeast, just flour, fat, water and sustained mechanical work to develop the gluten and trap thin sheets of air. Before commercial bakeries dominated the cracker trade, this was ordinary household baking, and the labour was real enough that some kitchens owned a hand-cranked brake to do the pounding. The recipe's appearance in a Five Roses collection is a reminder that these books were published by flour millers -- Five Roses was the brand of the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, and the volume circulated widely in Canadian homes as both cookbook and advertisement, with the flour named in the instruction line itself.