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Saltines
Boil sugar and water until syrup will thread. Remove to back of range and add marshmallows cut in pisces. Pour onto the whites of eggs beaten until stiff; then add cocoanut, vanilla, and nut meats. Spread saltines with mixture and bake until delicately browned. -
This is a marshmallow-meringue confection spread on crackers, not a cracker recipe. As printed the page gives only the method — the ingredient quantities lived in a headnote or a preceding recipe that is not reproduced here, so treat the amounts below as reconstruction rather than the book's own.
- Missing quantitiesSugar, water, marshmallows, egg whites, coconut, vanilla and nut meats are all called for with no measures. A workable ratio for a boiled-syrup meringue of this type is 1 cup sugar to 1/3 cup water and 2 egg whites, but the original figures are genuinely absent and any number given for the marshmallows or coconut is a guess.
- "Until syrup will thread"The thread stage is about 230-234F on a candy thermometer — syrup that falls from the spoon in a fine thread rather than in drops. This is the soft end of the scale; boiled much further the finished mixture will set harder.
- "Back of range"On a coal or wood range the back was the cool zone. Move the pan off the heat entirely and let the marshmallows melt in the residual warmth, stirring, before the syrup begins to set.
- Pouring onto the whitesThe whites must be beaten stiff before the syrup is ready, and the hot syrup goes in a thin steady stream down the side of the bowl with the mixer running. Dumped in at once it cooks the whites into threads.
- CocoanutPeriod recipes usually intend freshly grated or dried shredded coconut, unsweetened. Modern sweetened flake coconut will push an already very sweet mixture further; unsweetened is likely closer to the intent.
- OvenNo temperature is given, and the text names no oven setting at all. 'Delicately browned' suggests a low oven; a modern equivalent would be around 300-325F for roughly 10-15 minutes — watch it, since the sugar colors fast at the edges and the cracker beneath can scorch before the topping does.
- The crackersSet them on a lined sheet with a little space between; the topping spreads slightly as it warms.
- Yield and keepingWith no quantities in the text the yield cannot be worked out. They are best the day they are made — the crackers soften under the moist topping.
Saltine crackers as a base for sweet, broiled or baked toppings run all through American cookery of the early twentieth century, and this recipe belongs to that habit for exactly that reason: it produces something cracker-thin to pass with tea or after dinner without any dough-making at all. Its real marker of date is the marshmallow. Marshmallow had shifted by the 1900s from a paste made with the mucilage of the marsh-mallow root to a cheap commercial gelatin candy sold by the box, and cookbooks of the period seized on it as a shortcut ingredient stirred into frostings, folded into fudge, or as here dissolved into a boiled-sugar meringue to give body and chew. The spelling "cocoanut," standard in nineteenth-century American print and now obsolete, and the phrase "back of range," which assumes a solid-fuel stove with a permanent cool corner, both date the text more precisely than any of its ingredients do.