• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

CooksInfo

  • Home
  • Encyclopaedia
  • Kitchenware
  • Recipes
  • Food Calendar
menu icon
go to homepage
search icon
Homepage link
  • Recipes
  • Encyclopaedia
  • Kitchenware
  • Food Calendar
×
Home » Bread » Biscuits » Crackers

Crackers

Crackers

Celery Crackers
© Denzil Green


Contents hide
  • 1 Literature & Lore
  • 2 Language Notes


A Cracker is a dry, thin, unsweetened, flat biscuit. You can also think of it as a dried flat bread.

Crackers can be leavened or unleavened. Saltines are sometimes called “soda crackers” because of the baking soda used in them.

Though the word Crackers is also used in the UK, it is used to refer to specific products such as Jacob’s Cream Crackers and Ritz Crackers rather than as a generic term. In the UK, crackers are called savoury biscuits or cheese biscuits.

Literature & Lore

The word ‘cracker’ is an insult in the American South. Generally, it means you are a hick, shoeless and without an education.

Language Notes

Most Crackers are quite brittle. When you break one, it will make a cracking noise, and perhaps the name was coined because of that. The OED shows the word Cracker first appearing in the US about 1739, but by the 1830s the word also showed up in Royal Navy food inventories.

This page first published: Jan 18, 2004 · Updated: Oct 4, 2020.

This web site generates income from affiliated links and ads at no cost to you to fund continued research · Information on this site is Copyright © 2022· Feel free to cite correctly, but copying whole pages for your website is content theft and will be DCMA'd.

Tagged With: American Food, Crackers

Primary Sidebar

Search

    Today is

  • International Plastic Bag Free Day
    Single-use plastic carrier bags
  • M.F.K. Fisher’s Birthday
    Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher

Footer

↑ back to top

About

  • About this site
  • Privacy Policy
  • Copyright enforced!
  • Terms & Conditions

Newsletter

  • Sign Up! for emails and updates

Site

  • Recipes
  • Encyclopaedia
  • Kitchenware
  • Food Calendar

This web site generates income from affiliated links and ads at no cost to you to fund continued research · The text on this site is © Copyright.