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Cornmeal Crackers
Put two pounds of cornmeal into a basin and work in four tablespoonfuls of warmed fat or butter; then mix in one pound of sugar, pour in gradually one breakfast cupful of milk, and add enough wheat-flour to form a stiff dough. After kneading it well, allow it to stand for two or three hours in a warm place. Take up small pieces of the dough about the size of a walnut, shape them like shells, brown them in boiling fat, and serve on a dish with a folded napkin, or ornamental paper.
Despite the name, these are not crisp crackers but small sweet fried dough shells, closer to a cornmeal cruller. The proportions are for a hotel kitchen and need scaling down before anything else.
- Scale it downTwo pounds of cornmeal and a pound of sugar will yield several dozen pieces. A quarter batch — 8 oz cornmeal, 4 oz sugar, 1 tablespoon fat, about 1/4 cup milk — is a sensible home trial.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup, roughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces. Treat it as a starting point and add milk until the dough comes together, since cornmeal absorption varies widely by grind.
- Cornmeal grindUse fine or medium yellow cornmeal, not coarse polenta grind and not masa. Coarse meal stays gritty even after the long rest.
- Why the two-hour restThe ingredient list includes no leavening, so the standing time appears to be mainly for hydration: the meal softens and the dough stops crumbling. Skipping it is likely to give sandy pieces that fall apart in the fat.
- Enough wheat-flourThe flour is structural and unmeasured; the recipe gives no figure, and you may well need a substantial amount, perhaps a quarter to a half the weight of the cornmeal. Stop when the dough holds a shape under the thumb without sticking to it.
- Shape them like shellsFlatten each walnut-sized piece and press it over the back of a fork or your thumb to make a shallow curl. Thin edges brown faster than thick centers, so keep the thickness even or the middles stay raw.
- Boiling fat means deep fryingAim for somewhere around 350F. Much cooler and the sugary dough soaks up grease; much hotter and the sugar scorches before the inside is cooked. Fry in small batches, turning once, and go by colour rather than the clock.
- ServingThe folded napkin on the dish was there partly to absorb fat. Drain on a rack or paper first and serve them the day they are made; they will likely harden overnight.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 book gathers the working repertoire of the Waldorf's kitchens alongside a broad sweep of American and European domestic cookery, which is why a homely fried cornmeal sweet sits near far grander dishes. "Cracker" in nineteenth-century American usage most often meant a small hard baked biscuit, so its application here to a fried sweetened dough is a loose one. The heavy reliance on cornmeal, with wheat flour added only as much as needed to bind, reflects the older American pattern in which corn was the cheap staple and wheat the costlier corrective - a habit visible throughout the corn breads, mushes and johnnycakes of period cookbooks. The instruction to serve on a folded napkin or ornamental paper is standard hotel service: fried items were presented on folded linen well into the twentieth century.