Friday, January 14, 2011

Cooking with Crackers

The word “austerity” comes to mind to capture the mindset of January.  Bleak economy, bleak resolutions to do better, to make do with less.  January’s grim watchword might be: “Endure.” What better food for this stark time than … crackers?

Yes, crackers, the unleavened survival sustenance of the past, made from general-store staples like flour, salt, a dab of lard, and water dipped from a well.  Food historians locate ancestral cracker recipes of baked millet in ancient Rome.  But crackers only entered the modern palate in the late 18th century, when resourceful New Englanders pounded biscuits thin and baked ‘em dry so that sea voyagers could have victuals that wouldn’t rot – fittingly named “hardtack.” You can see the Western version of this subsistence food, corn dodgers, featured in the film True Grit, when Rooster Cogburn, worse for wear from whiskey and waving a pistol, uses the crispy disks as a poor man’s clay pigeons.

Crackers are stark planes of efficient calories – survival food for austere times.  Cracker sales swelled during the Depression, when newspaper recipe columns touted cracker crumbs for stretching meatloaves and casseroles.  And during the Jimmy Carter Seventies, when we saved energy by pulling on sweaters instead of turning up thermostats, we learned to bake “mock apple pies” with Ritz crackers instead of fruit.  (Not recommended for anyone who has ever eaten actual apple pie.)

Of course, crackers are also the comfort food of childhood, from our first drooling encounter with Zwieback as teething toddlers or the cellophaned twin cracker packets that parents use to busy their kids in restaurants. (Anyone who has worked the food service circuit can attest to the blizzard of crumbs around tables with tiny patrons.) Think, too, of the snacks of your kindergarten days – likely dry graham cracker rectangles – with their unglamorous ancestry as fiber-filled digestive supplements for the gout-plagued middle-class of the Nineteenth century.

The appeal of crackers is simple chemistry.  Remember that basic enzyme experiment where you dust the salt off a Saltine and chew it to a mash for a couple of disgusting minutes, until saliva sweetens the starch to sugar, right on your bewildered tongue?  That’s the reason I’ve seen stressed-out teenagers plow through a whole sleeve of crackers to get that 530-calorie hit of comforting carbs.  Who hasn’t been there?

My own latest cracker fetish began right before the holidays, when a New York Times food column on nostalgic homemade sweets caught my eye with a 5-ingredient recipe for something confounding called Saltine Cracker Brickle, whose directions begin like a primary-school art project: “Line a cookie sheet with foil, and lay Saltines end-to-end to fill the tray.” Next you stir over a hot flame a ½ pound of butter, a cup of sugar, and teaspoon of vanilla until bubbly, pour the aromatic mess over the crackers, and bake at 350 for 7 minutes. Then, pull the molten slab out of the oven and sprinkle with 3 cups of the best chocolate chips you can find, slide it all back into the oven for two minutes, and smooth the melted chocolate over the top. Voilà.  Chill, break into pieces, and enjoy the worshipful praise of loved ones.  You must try this.

When I first shared this recipe, I was rewarded with an avalanche of similar family favorites, some made with matzo or grahams, but all sharing the brilliant simplicity of carb-on-carb-on-fat-on-chocolate.  What more could a body want to make it through hibernation season?

Of course, the more ambitious among you may wish to try the flip side of cracker-cookery – making your own crackers from scratch.  Like pie-crusts, homemade crackers require a tolerance for fiddling: Roll ‘em too thin and they burn and break; roll ‘em too thick and they are the texture of felted wool, but twice as heavy.  Over the holidays I got to try homemade cheddar crackers – like savory shortbread, heavenly with Cabernet – and also homemade Wheat Thins, seasoned surprisingly with turmeric and vanilla. Simple cracker recipes abound on the Web, and you can experiment with non-gluten grains, eccentric seeds and fancy salts – all ingredients that cost pennies in this still-stark economy.

Viewed in the sunniest midwinter light, crackers fit the aesthetics of a new year – all clean lines, and open planes of possibility.  Holiday puddings taste of the past.  Crisp and snappy crackers?  They’re fuel for the future, and that future starts now.

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on January 14, 2011 • WVPE's Audio Archive
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