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Sweet Crackers
4 eggs. 4 cupfuls sugar. 1/2 pound butter. 1 teaspoonful soda. 1 cupful sour cream. Pounded cinnamon and grated nutmeg for flavoring. Sufficient flour for a soft dough. Roll thin and cut it with tin shapes, and bake quickly.--Mrs. S.
A plain rolled sugar cookie in nineteenth-century dress, leavened by the reaction between soda and sour cream. The flour is left to the cook's judgment, which is the only real difficulty.
- The hinge: roll thin and bake fastThese are meant to be crisp, not soft. The book gives no temperature; "bake quickly" implies a hot oven, so roll to about 1/8 inch and bake at around 400-425F for 6 to 8 minutes, until the edges just colour. A slower oven dries them into something dull and pale.
- What "cracker" means hereNot necessarily a savoury biscuit. In this period "cracker" was applied to thin, crisp baked goods sweet as well as plain, and this one is close to what a modern cook would call a rolled sugar cookie.
- Half a pound of butterTwo sticks, 8 oz or 225 g. Have it soft enough to cream with the sugar but not melted, or the dough will spread in the oven.
- Sour cream and sodaThe soda needs the acid in the cream to work. Full-fat cultured sour cream is the closest substitute for the old farmhouse article; sweet cream will leave the dough flat and slightly soapy from unreacted soda.
- "Sufficient flour"Genuinely open. With this quantity of butter, sugar and eggs, expect somewhere around 7 to 8 cups, added a cup at a time until the dough just holds together and stops sticking to the hands. Stop the moment it is workable — more flour means a tough cracker.
- Scale the batch downFour eggs and four cups of sugar makes an enormous quantity, well over a hundred thin crackers. Halving or quartering the recipe is straightforward, and the dough keeps wrapped in the refrigerator for several days.
- Pounded cinnamon and grated nutmegPounded means ground in a mortar from stick cinnamon. Ground cinnamon from a jar is fine; start with 2 teaspoons cinnamon and a whole nutmeg grated fresh, and adjust. Pre-ground nutmeg has far less of the volatile oil that carries the flavour.
- Tin shapesCookie cutters. Chill the rolled dough for twenty minutes before cutting if the kitchen is warm — cold dough takes a clean edge and holds its outline.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, gathered its contents from a network of Virginia housewives, which is why so many entries end with an initial rather than a name. The recipe's reliance on sour cream and soda places it in a nineteenth-century American kitchen in which saleratus and then bicarbonate of soda were increasingly used alongside the older practice of beating air into eggs or waiting on a yeast sponge — a sour dairy product plus alkali gave an immediate lift and used up cream that had turned. The word "cracker" for a sweet biscuit is now nearly lost in American usage but was ordinary then, describing the crisp snap of anything rolled thin and baked hot.