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Soaked Crackers
Place several soda crackers in a soup plate; pour over them boiling water and let stand for about a minute. Drain off the water and serve with butter and salt, butter and nutmeg, cream and salt, or cream and sugar.
Hot milk may be substituted for the boiling water if desired. 1 egg 1 teaspoon sugar
A one-minute sickroom dish rather than anything to do with canning, and it survives modern scrutiny intact. Two things need saying: what a soda cracker was, and where that stray egg came from.
- The stray line"1 egg 1 teaspoon sugar" belongs to no step in this recipe. It appears to be a fragment left over from a neighbouring recipe; whatever its origin, nothing in the method uses it, so ignore it.
- Soda crackersA plain hard leavened cracker, close to today's saltine but thicker and drier, and often unsalted or lightly salted. Saltines work; use them slightly stale, since a fresh soft cracker collapses into paste on contact with boiling water.
- One minute means one minuteThe recipe says "about a minute"; the cracker should swell and soften while holding its shape. Leave it much longer and it breaks down, with little left to drain.
- DrainingTip the plate and pour the water off rather than lifting the crackers, which will break. The point of the soak is to soften and warm, not to make a broth.
- Quantity"Several" is left undefined; take it as one portion's worth. A soup plate is a wide shallow bowl, and its shape matters here: it spreads the crackers in a single layer so they soften evenly.
- NutmegGrate it over at the table. Pre-ground nutmeg loses most of its aroma and this dish has nothing else in it to hide behind.
This is invalid cookery -- food for the sick, the very young and the toothless. Soaked crackers sit in the same family as milk toast, gruel, beef tea and arrowroot pudding, the small bland repertoire that filled the sickroom chapters of many American household manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when convalescence happened at home. The soda cracker is generally traced back to ship's biscuit, baked hard so it would keep, and reviving hard biscuit in hot liquid is a much older habit than the cracker barrel; what this recipe adds is the row of finishes at the end -- butter and salt, cream and sugar -- which give one dull dish some variation.