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Crisp Crackers
Split common crackers and spread thinly with butter, allowing one-fourth teaspoon butter to each half cracker; put in pan and bake until delicately browned.
Souffléd Crackers Split common crackers, and soak in ice water, to cover, eight minutes. Dot over with butter, and bake in a hot oven until puffed and browned, the time required being about forty-five minutes.
Two soup garnishes from the same page, both built on the New England common cracker. The second is the more interesting of the pair, and the soaking step is what makes it work.
- What a common cracker isA thick, dry, hard-baked round cracker, roughly two inches across, made to be split along its seam into two halves. Vermont common crackers are still produced and are the closest thing available; oyster crackers are too small and saltines too thin and salty to substitute in the souffled version.
- The hinge: soak the whole eight minutesThe ice water is not a rinse. The dry cracker has to take up enough water that steam can inflate it in the oven, which is exactly how the puff happens. Under-soaked crackers simply toast; over-soaked ones collapse into mush when lifted.
- Lift them wet, carefullyA soaked cracker half is fragile. Move each one with a slotted spatula, cut side up, and let surface water drain off before dotting with butter.
- "Hot oven"The book gives no figure; by the conventions of the period this falls somewhere in the region of 400-450F. No temperature or time at all is given for the plain buttered crackers, only the instruction to bake until delicately browned.
- Forty-five minutes is rightIt reads long for a cracker, but the time is doing two jobs: driving off the absorbed water as steam to raise the crumb, then drying the puffed shell so it stays crisp. Pulling them early gives a soggy centre.
- Butter quantityA quarter teaspoon per half cracker works out to about a tablespoon for a dozen halves. For the souffled version, dot rather than spread so the butter does not seal the surface before it can rise.
- Yield and servingServing -- The recipe gives no yield or serving instruction. Crackers of this kind soften quickly in hot liquid, so they are better brought to the table separately than floated in the soup.
The common cracker was a staple of New England pantries through the nineteenth century, a hard, long-keeping biscuit sold from barrels in country stores and eaten with chowder, milk, or cheese. Its defining feature was the seam that let it be split in two, exposing a dry interior that took butter well and crisped readily. Fannie Farmer gives these among the accompaniments to soup, and the souffled treatment turns a plain keeping-cracker into something closer to a pastry. Letting trapped steam inflate a moistened dough in a hot oven is broadly the principle at work in cream puffs and popovers, both of which appear elsewhere in the book.