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Egg Crackers
Six eggs, twelve table-spoons sweet milk, six table-spoons butter, half tea-spoon soda; mold with flour half an hour, and roll thin.- Mrs. J. S. Robinson.
A cracker dough of the beaten-biscuit family: no sugar, no water, and almost no leavening, so all the lift and tenderness come from eggs, butter and long working. The half hour of "molding" is the recipe, not a preliminary to it.
- The half hour of moldingThis is the hinge. Working the stiff dough for a full thirty minutes develops gluten, which is what gives these crackers their blistered, flaky snap. A stand mixer with a dough hook on low will shorten the work considerably; the dough should turn smooth, satiny and blister when cut.
- MeasuresTwelve tablespoons of milk is three-quarters of a cup; six tablespoons of butter is three ounces. Eggs were ungraded and varied in size, and were often smaller than today's large eggs, so five large eggs may be nearer the original volume.
- Flour is unmeasured on purpose"Mold with flour" means work in as much as the dough will take. Expect roughly 4 to 5 cups of all-purpose flour for a dough that is very stiff and barely tacky, drier than pie pastry. Add it gradually; too little and the crackers will not crisp.
- Sweet milk and soda"Sweet milk" is plain fresh milk, unsoured. With no acid present, the half teaspoon of soda does very little chemically here beyond a faint browning and softening effect, which is consistent with a cracker rather than a risen biscuit.
- SaltThe recipe gives none. Farm butter was usually salted, which may account for the omission. Use salted butter, or add about a teaspoon of salt to the flour.
- Rolling and dockingRoll to about an eighth of an inch, cut into rounds or squares, and prick each one through several times with a fork. Undocked crackers puff into hollow pillows instead of staying flat and crisp.
- OvenNo temperature is given, and the recipe says nothing about baking at all. Around 350F for 12 to 18 minutes, until pale gold and dry through, is a safe modern starting point; too high a heat risks coloring the surface before the center has dried out.
- Cooling and yieldThey crisp as they cool, so judge doneness by dryness rather than snap in the oven. The yield depends entirely on how thin they are rolled and how large they are cut; store airtight, and re-crisp in a low oven if they soften.
Egg crackers belong to the tradition of hard, unsweetened biscuit that reached its best-known form in the beaten biscuit, where a stiff dough was pounded with a mallet, an axe head, or a rolling pin until it blistered. Before commercial baking powder was cheap and trusted, that mechanical work was the leavening, and eggs added richness and a little more lift. The Dixie Cook Book, a late nineteenth-century compilation built from contributed household receipts, is full of such attributions to named women like Mrs. J. S. Robinson, and the brevity is deliberate: a cook who already knew how a cracker dough should feel needed only the proportions, not the method. Crackers of this sort kept for weeks in a tin.