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Cheese Crackers
8 crackers salt, cayenne grated cheese butter Spread crackers thinly with butter, sprinkle with salt and cayenne, and cover with grated cheese. Cook in oven until cheese is melted.
A savoury of the plainest sort, printed without quantities because none are needed. The only real decision is the cheese and the oven heat.
- CrackersIn 1907 this most likely means a plain soda or water cracker: a thin unsweetened biscuit rather than one with a heavy salt crust. If you use saltines, skip the sprinkle of salt entirely.
- Oven heatThe book gives none. A hot oven, 400–425F, for 4 to 6 minutes gets the cheese melted before the cracker darkens. A broiler works but wants watching; the edges of a thin cracker scorch in seconds.
- Grated cheeseA firm dry cheese is what is wanted — aged Cheddar, or Parmesan, which turns up in some period savouries. Fresh mozzarella or anything wet will slide off and leave the cracker soggy.
- Butter thinlyThe instruction to spread thinly is the hinge. A thick layer liquefies under the cheese and the cracker goes limp; a scrape is enough to hold the gratings in place.
- Quantity and servingReckon on about 1/4 cup grated cheese and a tablespoon of butter for eight crackers, serving two. Serve them straight from the oven — they soften as they stand and are dull when cold.
Cheese crackers of this kind belong to the family of savouries: small hot bites of cheese, anchovy or marrow served at the close of a dinner, a habit borrowed from English practice and common in American cookbooks by the turn of the twentieth century. Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and it surrounded its chocolate and cocoa recipes with a good deal of general domestic-science material — hence a recipe stripped to a bare list of ingredients with no amounts at all. That absence is itself informative: factory-made crackers were by then so standard an article that a cook could be trusted to know what one looked like and how much cheese it would hold.