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Lemon Crackers
Two cups of sugar, one each of shortening and milk, two eggs, grated rind of three lemons, and two ounces of baking ammonia, with sufficient flour to make a very stiff dough. Roll thin, cut in squares, and bake.
LEMON SANDWICHES (Mrs. Rorer) Cut bread in form desired, then place slices in tight box with lemon peel wrapped close to it and between slices. Leave for several hours before using then butter and serve. The butter should also have been prepared with lemon flavouring by placing lemon rinds generously in the butter jar or cup, and when ready to spread the juice of one lemon added for each cup of butter.
Two separate items are run together here: a hard sweet cracker leavened with baker's ammonia, and Mrs. Rorer's uncooked lemon-scented bread and butter. Both are workable, but the cracker dough needs judgement the original does not supply.
- Baking ammoniaThis is hartshorn, sold today as baker's ammonia or ammonium bicarbonate, and it is still available from baking suppliers. It works only in thin, dry goods, where the gas and the ammonia smell escape completely during baking; in a thick cookie the smell stays in the crumb. Baking powder is not a substitute in this recipe, since the crisp, shattering texture comes from the ammonia.
- That quantity is enormousTwo ounces is a commercial-scale dose. Modern practice for a batch of this size is on the order of one to two teaspoons, dissolved in the milk before mixing. If you use the full two ounces the raw dough will be sharply pungent and the crackers must be rolled paper-thin and baked dry to drive it off.
- Flour is left to you"Sufficient flour to make a very stiff dough" means stiff enough to roll like pastry with no slack at all — expect somewhere around 6 to 7 cups for these proportions, added gradually. A slack dough will not hold the thin sheet the leavener requires.
- ShorteningOne cup of shortening in this period could mean lard, butter, or a mixture of the two; commercial vegetable shortenings were also on the market. Either lard or butter works; butter alone gives a shorter, more biscuit-like cracker.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given. Bake thin squares at 375F for roughly 8 to 12 minutes, until dry and just coloured at the edges. They should snap when cool, not bend.
- VentilateAmmonia gas comes off in quantity as the crackers bake. Open a window or run the extractor fan, and do not lean over the oven door when you open it.
- Zest, not peel"Grated rind" is the coloured zest only. Take none of the white pith, which is bitter and will not soften in a dry cracker.
- The lemon sandwichesThis is scenting by contact — a sealed box, oils migrating from the rind into the bread and the butter. Use unwaxed lemons, and refrigerate the butter while it sits with the rinds. The juice of a whole lemon per cup of butter makes a loose, sharp spread; beat it in a little at a time so it does not break.
- YieldThe cracker dough makes a large batch, roughly six to eight dozen small squares. They keep for weeks in a tin if baked properly dry.
Lemon crackers are particularly associated with New England and upstate New York, where they were sold from bakeries and country stores as a hard, faintly sweet cracker to be eaten out of hand or dunked in tea — closer to a rusk than to a modern cookie. Their defining ingredient, baking ammonia, was originally hartshorn, distilled from deer antlers; old receipts sometimes call for "volatile salts", a name reflecting how readily the salt gasses off. It predates baking powder as a chemical leavener and survives in Scandinavian and German baking for exactly the same reason it appears here, because it makes thin dough shatteringly crisp rather than merely risen. The lemon sandwiches are credited to Sarah Tyson Rorer, who ran the Philadelphia Cooking School and was among the most widely reprinted American cookery writers of the 1890s and 1900s.