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Browned Crackers
8 crackers salt butter cayenne Spread crackers with butter, sprinkle with salt ar d cayenne, and brown in oven.
A one-line savoury from an era when crackers came from a barrel and every soup course wanted something crisp beside it. The only real decisions are the oven temperature and how long you dare leave them.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern reading; watch from about 5 minutes on, since a hotter oven risks the butter darkening before the cracker colours.
- Which crackerThe added salt suggests a plain unsalted cracker, such as a soda cracker or a New England common cracker, rather than a modern salted saltine or a seeded snack cracker. If your crackers are already salted, skip the added salt.
- ButterSoften it to spreading consistency first; cold butter tears a thin cracker. Roughly a teaspoon per cracker is enough to gloss the surface without pooling.
- CayenneThe recipe says only "sprinkle". Start with a scant pinch across all eight and taste one before adding more.
- Watch themThis is the hinge. Crackers go from pale to burnt in under a minute at the end, and the butter fat means they keep darkening off the heat. Pull them when they are just golden.
- Common crackers, if you have themThe thick round New England common cracker is split in half before buttering, cut side up. Thin modern crackers are used whole.
- Yield and servingEight crackers, to be served alongside soup, chowder or a cheese course. They are best eaten soon after baking, as the butter softens them as they sit.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, and though it is best remembered for its chocolate work it carries a full household repertoire, including short reference items of the kind gathered under general table headings. Browned crackers belong to the American soup course: a crisp buttered cracker was a standard accompaniment to chowder, bisque and consomme, and cookbooks of the period give small variations on it -- buttered, cheesed, or spread with anchovy. The cayenne is characteristic of turn-of-the-century American seasoning, where a trace of red pepper stood in for the general idea of "savoury" in oysters, cheese straws and cream soups alike. The recipe's brevity is itself informative: it assumed a reader who kept crackers by the barrel or tin and needed only the reminder, not the method.