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Cream Crisps
2 cups graham flour 2 cups white flour 2 tablespoons sugar 1 1/2 cups cream 1 teaspoon salt Sift the flour, salt and sugar together in a bowl; pour the cream into the flour slowly, a few spoons at a time, mixing each spoon to a dough with the flour as fast as poured in. When all the liquid has been added, gather the fragments of dough together. Knead thoroughly for from five to ten minutes; roll very thin; cut in two inch lengths. Prick with a fork, and bake in a moderate oven.
Serve hot with butter. Any that are left over can be reheated in the oven.
An unleavened cracker in which cream supplies all the liquid and all the fat. The dough is stiff and the success of the thing rests almost entirely on how thin you roll it.
- Roll thinner than feels rightWith no leavening at all, thickness is the only variable between a crisp and a hard biscuit. Aim for 1/16 inch, thin enough to see the board through the sheet, and dock every piece with a fork so it does not blister.
- Moderate oven350F. The crisps want 12 to 18 minutes, until the surface is dry and the edges just take colour; the original gives no time, so judge by colour and turn the sheet once if your oven runs uneven.
- Graham flourCoarsely ground whole wheat, including the bran and germ, sold today as graham or stone-ground whole wheat flour. It is not the same as ordinary whole-wheat pastry flour, which is finer and will give a less rugged cracker.
- SiftingThe bran in graham flour will not pass a fine sieve. Sift the white flour, salt and sugar, then stir the graham in by hand and return whatever stays behind in the sieve to the bowl.
- The creamModern heavy cream at 36 percent fat may well be richer than the cream a household of the period skimmed for itself, though fat content varied a good deal. Light cream or half-and-half gives a softer dough; with heavy cream you may need a spoon or two of milk to bring the last dry flour together.
- Knead in earnestFive to ten minutes on a stiff, barely moist dough is not a misprint. The gluten development is what lets the sheet roll paper-thin without tearing, and it is what makes the finished cracker snap rather than crumble.
- Cutting"Two inch lengths" means strips: cut the rolled sheet into two-inch pieces of whatever width your rolling gives. Uniform thickness matters more than uniform shape, since thin scraps burn while thick ones stay soft.
- Yield and keepingThe yield depends entirely on how thin you roll and how wide you cut; four cups of flour makes a very large batch. Cool them fully before storing airtight or the residual steam softens them; the note about reheating is the standard cure for crackers that have gone limp.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the American temperance preacher and dietary reformer of the 1830s who argued that unsifted whole-meal bread was morally and physically superior to the fashionable white loaf. His followers made coarse whole-wheat flour a fixture of nineteenth-century reform cookery, and it passed from there into the vegetarian and "meatless" cookbooks of the early twentieth century, which drew heavily on the same reform tradition. Cream crisps belong to a large family of home-baked crackers that filled the place now held by boxed factory biscuits: unleavened, quick to mix, and useful for serving with soup, cheese or simply hot with butter. The reliance on cream rather than butter or lard may suggest a household with its own dairy supply, where cream was the fat most readily at hand, though cream was also an ordinary shop purchase.