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Cracknells
To one pint of rich milk put two ounces butter and spoon of yeast. Make it warm, and mix enough fine flour to make a light dough; roll thin and cut in long pieces, two inches broad. Prick well, and bake in slow oven. - Effie A. Adams , Quincy, Ills.
A cracknell is meant to come out dry, hard and snapping — closer to a water biscuit than a tea bread. The instructions are terse because the cook of 1883 already knew that.
- The hinge: roll very thin and prickCracknells depend on being rolled thin enough to dry through rather than rise. Roll to about 1/8 inch and dock the surface all over with a fork so no steam pockets form; any puffing gives you a soft biscuit instead.
- "Spoon of yeast"A spoonful of whatever leaven the cook had to hand, which in 1883 might be homemade barm, a liquid yeast or compressed cake yeast; there is no fixed modern equivalent. A rough working substitute is about 1 teaspoon of active dry yeast, but the original quantity is genuinely ambiguous.
- Slow oven300F. The point is to dry the dough out rather than colour it; at 350F or above the strips brown before they crisp through.
- "Make it warm"Warm the milk and butter together only to blood heat, around 100F, before adding the yeast. Butter melted in hot milk will kill the yeast if added straight away.
- Rich milkIn 1883 this meant unskimmed milk with cream still in it. Whole milk works; half-and-half is closer to the original.
- Fine flourPlain white all-purpose flour. A pint of milk plus 2 oz butter will take roughly 4 to 5 cups — add it gradually, since "light dough" here means a soft dough you can still roll, not a batter.
- RisingNo proofing time is given. One rise of about an hour in a warm place, until the dough has clearly swelled, is enough; a long fermentation works against the dry snap you want.
- Yield and baking timeThe recipe fixes only the width, two inches, and gives no length, so the number of strips will depend on how you cut them. Expect roughly 20 to 30 minutes at 300F -- they are done when pale, firm and dry right through, and they harden further as they cool.
- KeepingCool completely and store airtight. Properly dried cracknells keep for weeks; any softness means they were underbaked, and a few minutes back in the low oven will fix it.
Cracknells are one of the oldest survivals in the English biscuit vocabulary — the name comes through the French craquelin, from a word for the cracking sound, and the biscuits appear in English household books from the sixteenth century onward. The older method often involved dropping the shaped dough briefly into boiling water before baking, much as pretzels and bagels are treated, which set the crust and gave the characteristic glassy snap; in this version, which reached an Illinois contributor in the 1880s, there is no boiling step, only a thin roll and a long slow bake. A dry, keeping biscuit made from milk, butter and flour was the practical companion to tea, cheese or invalid diets in a household without a bakery down the street. The Dixie Cook-Book credits its recipes to the women who sent them in, and Effie A. Adams of Quincy is a reminder that the book's contributors ranged well beyond the South its title claims.