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Soda Crackers
1 quart of flour. 1 tablespoonful of lard and butter mixed. 1 egg; a little salt. 1 teaspoonful of soda, sifted into the flour.
Make a stiff paste with buttermilk, beat until light, roll tolerably thin, cut in squares, prick, and bake quickly.--Mrs. A. C.
A cracker in the beaten-biscuit tradition: no yeast, no long ferment, just soda, buttermilk and mechanical work. The beating is what makes it, and it is the step most likely to be skipped.
- "Beat until light"This is not whisking a batter. Stiff Southern doughs of this era were commonly folded and struck repeatedly with a mallet or rolling pin; beaten-biscuit directions call for twenty to thirty minutes of it, until the dough blistered and the surface turned satiny. The beating works air in and develops gluten, which gives these crackers their snap and layered break. A food processor run for a minute or two, or a pasta roller folded and passed through twenty-odd times, approximates the effect.
- A quart of flourFlour was measured by volume in a dry quart measure: roughly 4 cups, about 1 pound. Scoop and level rather than pack.
- Fat and eggA tablespoon of lard and butter mixed is a total of one tablespoon, not one of each. Rub it in cold, as for pastry. The egg is unusual for a cracker and enriches the dough slightly; it will make them browner than a commercial soda cracker.
- Soda and buttermilkThe teaspoon of soda needs the acid of real cultured buttermilk to lift anything. Cultured buttermilk from a carton works. Sweet milk will leave a soapy, faintly yellow taste. Add the buttermilk sparingly — a stiff paste means barely cohesive, stiffer than biscuit dough.
- "Bake quickly"Means a hot oven; in modern terms somewhere around 425-450F. Eight to twelve minutes, depending on how thin you rolled them; they should be pale gold with darker blistered spots.
- Rolling and prickingTolerably thin means about 1/8 inch. Docking with a fork all the way through is not decorative — it stops the layers ballooning into pillows in the fast oven.
- Yield and keepingSeveral dozen 2-inch crackers, depending on how thin you rolled. Cool them completely on a rack; any residual steam softens them. If they go limp after a day, five minutes in a 300F oven crisps them again.
Soda crackers belong to the same Virginia kitchen logic as the beaten biscuits that recur throughout this book: a flour-and-fat dough made light by physical labor rather than yeast. Marion Cabell Tyree assembled Housekeeping in Old Virginia, first published in 1878, from contributions by named and initialed cooks -- "Mrs. A. C." here -- and the recipes assume the reader already knew what a stiff paste felt like under the mallet. Soda, sold as saleratus earlier in the century, had by the 1870s largely replaced pearlash in American home baking, and buttermilk was the household acid nearest to hand on any place that churned its own butter. Commercially baked soda crackers were available by this date, though the presence of a home recipe here is not by itself evidence of what Virginia households preferred.