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Soda Crackers
These are made by adding from one to two teaspoonfuls of bicarbonate of soda to either of the foregoing recipes, or in the following way: Make three-quarters of a pound of flour into a very stiff dough with sour milk in which one saltspoonful of bicarbonate of soda has been dissolved; work into this one dessertspoonful of lard mixed with butter; beat it well and roll it out very thin. Prick well with a fork and bake in a moderate oven.
A bare-bones cracker formula from a chapter that assumes you have already read the plain-cracker recipes above it. The whole success of it lies in how thin you roll the dough and how thoroughly you dock it.
- Roll thinner than feels rightThis is the hinge. The dough should go out to about 1/16 inch, thin enough to see shadow through it; anything thicker bakes into a hard biscuit rather than a crisp cracker. Prick the whole sheet closely with a fork so it does not balloon.
- The old measuresA saltspoonful is a quarter teaspoon. A dessertspoonful is two teaspoons, so the fat here amounts to about a third of an ounce of lard and butter mixed. Three-quarters of a pound of flour is roughly 2 3/4 to 3 cups.
- Sour milkThe original means milk naturally clabbered at room temperature, which is not what sours in a modern refrigerator. Use cultured buttermilk, about 1/2 to 2/3 cup, added gradually until the dough is genuinely stiff.
- Soda quantityThe first sentence suggests one to two teaspoons of bicarbonate for the earlier recipes; the standalone version calls for only a quarter teaspoon. Follow the smaller figure here, since it is matched to this amount of flour and acid. Too much soda gives a soapy, faintly yellow cracker.
- OvenThe book gives no temperatures; "moderate" is conventionally read as somewhere around 350-375F. Crackers do better nearer 400F for 8 to 12 minutes, but at 350F allow 15 to 18 minutes and pull them when they are dry and lightly freckled rather than browned.
- SaltNone is specified here. Half a teaspoon worked into the flour, plus a scatter of coarse salt on the rolled sheet before baking, brings it into line with what modern eaters expect from a soda cracker.
- Beating the dough"beat it well" may mean what it says: some nineteenth-century cracker and biscuit doughs were pounded with a rolling pin or mallet, folded, and pounded again. Ten minutes of folding and rolling is a reasonable modern substitute.
- Yield and keepingYield depends entirely on how thin you roll and how large you cut; expect several dozen two-inch crackers at least. Cool them completely on a rack; they soften within a day unless kept airtight, and a few minutes in a low oven crisps them again.
The soda cracker belongs to the long stretch between ship's biscuit and the factory saltine: an unleavened or barely leavened flour-and-water cracker made lighter by the reaction of bicarbonate with sour milk. Chemical leavening spread through American kitchens from the 1830s and 1840s under the name saleratus (at first potassium, later sodium bicarbonate), and cookbooks of the period are full of recipes retooled around it. By the time Oscar Tschirky's book appeared in 1896, crackers were largely a commercial bakery product, which makes their appearance in a hotel volume worth noting, though the recipe alone does not tell us how much the Waldorf kitchen actually made in-house. The telegraphic style here, opening with "either of the foregoing recipes," is characteristic of the book: it assumes a reader who already knows the trade.