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French Crackers
One and a half pounds each of flour and sugar, three-fourths pound butter, whites of five eggs; before cooking wash over with egg and dip in sugar.
A four-ingredient sweet biscuit written for a cook who already knew what the dough should feel like. Everything unstated — mixing, rolling, thickness, oven, time — has to be supplied.
- The hinge: roll them thinWith no leavening and no liquid beyond five egg whites, this is a stiff short paste that neither rises nor spreads much. Roll to about 1/8 inch and cut in rounds; rolled thick they bake into hard slabs rather than the crisp "cracker" intended.
- Weights in cups1 1/2 lb flour is roughly 5 1/2 cups; 1 1/2 lb sugar roughly 3 1/3 cups; 3/4 lb butter is 3 sticks. The whites of five eggs are about 5 fl oz, or a scant 2/3 cup.
- Scale it downAs written this is about four pounds of dough — 100 or more small crackers. A third of the recipe (about 1 3/4 cups flour, 1 cup sugar, 1 stick butter, 2 egg whites) is a sensible batch.
- Mixing orderCream the butter and sugar, work in the unbeaten whites, then the flour. The dough will look dry and sandy before it comes together; press rather than knead, and chill it before rolling.
- OvenNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, 350F, for 8 to 12 minutes, until the edges are pale gold. The high sugar means they colour and then burn quickly, so watch the last two minutes.
- Wash and dip"Wash over with egg" is not specified further; a whole beaten egg is the usual reading, though a yolk or spare white would serve. The sugar dip that follows is what gives the crackers their crackled, glittering top. Coarse or sanding sugar holds up better in the oven than granulated.
- CoolingThey leave the oven soft and firm as they cool. Lift them to a rack promptly, as the sugared surface will weld to the pan if left to set on it.
In nineteenth-century American usage "cracker" covered far more than the plain savoury biscuit it now means: any thin, dry, snapping baked good could be a cracker, and sweet versions like this sat comfortably among the breakfast and tea cakes. The "French" tag was applied loosely to anything that struck a cook as refined — here, perhaps the use of egg whites alone rather than whole eggs, which keeps the crumb pale, and the sugared glaze, though the reason can only be guessed at. The Dixie Cook-Book is generally attributed to the compiler Estelle Woods Wilcox, who assembled Southern household collections in the 1880s from contributed receipts, and the terseness of this entry is typical of that method.