a name first used in N. America, from the mid-18th century onwards, for a plain, unsweetened, dry, hard, bread product; thus corresponding to part of the domain covered by the wider English term biscuit (of which another major part belongs to the American term cookie). When crackers are broken into pieces they make a cracking noise, which accounts for the name.
Crackers may be leavened or unleavened. Those of the former sort were formerly baked by a particular method which called for a dough leavened with bicarbonate of soda (hence the term ‘soda cracker’) and left to stand until pockets of carbon dioxide formed in the mixture. When biscuits of this dough were placed in a very hot oven they rose quickly, giving the characteristic texture.
Unleavened crackers may be made from flour and water only (as are matzos) or with the addition of a little salt. Some examples of this sort are the small oyster cracker, used on top of seafood chowders, and the crackers known as ship's biscuit (or pilot biscuit or sea biscuit).
The Graham cracker, which is sweet, is made from Graham (wholemeal) flour.
The cracker barrel was an institution in American general stores and groceries which sold crackers loose in bulk. The term was first used in print in the 1870s.
In Britain crackers are generally thought of as a specific commercially made biscuit, the ‘cream cracker’, invented and first marketed by W. and R. Jacob of Dublin in 1885. Jacobs were also the first people to pack them in airtight cartons, so that crackers were soon exported all over the world. Cream crackers are made from flour, salt, and a very little fat, moistened with milk, or milk and water. The mixture is rolled very thin, ‘docked’ (punched with holes), cut into squares, and baked until pale brown. These crackers are now usually eaten with cheese.
Cream crackers, as Rachel Laudan (1996) informs us, achieved fame in Hawaii's Chinatown as Krim Krakers, from Singapore. Hawaii is quite a wonderful place for biscuit historians. The lore associated with ‘saloon pilots’, Hawaii's own name for crackers (or hard tack or sea biscuits), has much fascination. Laudan writes that:
Sea biscuits were known as pilot bread from New England through the West Indies. New England seamen must have brought the use of the work ‘pilot’ for a sea biscuit with them to Hawaii. My suspicion is that ‘saloon’ was added as the crackers became richer and finer than the original hardtack, because the saloon on a ship was usually reserved for the better-off passengers. Along with salted meat and fish and pickled meats, saloon pilots are one of many symptoms of the atavism of Hawaii's food. Neither crisp and tender like soda crackers, nor elegantly spotted with brown like water biscuits, their thickness, their chewiness, and their relative lack of salt make saloon pilots closer to what I imagine hardtack must originally have tasted like.
For a completely different sort of cracker, from SE Asia but increasingly familiar in the western world, see prawn crackers.
Alan Davidson was a distinguished author and publisher, and one of the world's best-known writers on fish and fish cookery. In 1975 he retired early from the diplomatic service—after serving in, among other places, Washington, Egypt, Tunisia, and Laos, where he was British Ambassador—to pursue a fruitful second career as a food historian and food writer extraordinaire. Among his popular books are Seafood of South-East Asia, North Atlantic Seafood, and Mediterranean Seafood. In 2003, shortly before his death, he was awarded the Erasmus Prize for his contribution to European culture.
Laudan, Rachel (1996), The Food of Paradise, Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.
Swinburne, Layinka (1997), ‘… Ship's Biscuit and Portable Soup’, in Food on the Move, Oxford Symposium on Food History 1996, Totnes: Prospect Books.
