The Vermont Common Cracker

By Robert Mills and George Edson

In a 1980s Jeff Danziger cartoon, a man with a hammer sits in front of a bowl full of soup and crackers. That image sums up the foodstuff in question, the humble Common Cracker. No doubt about it, if anything, common crackers are hard.

Danziger’s image is part of a new exhibit from the Montpelier Historical Society, Common Cracker: The Exhibit, which opened at The Vermont History Museum in Montpelier the first week of August. A staple of the Vermont diet throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, common crackers can still be found in Vermont’s culinary landscape, with some diehards continuing to enjoy them to this day. Danziger’s cartoon captures today’s prevailing attitude toward the ancient food artifact.

But it wasn’t always so. Ironically, common crackers came about as an alternative to their tasteless and hard predecessors. Prior to 1800, the only crackers known to Americans were made simply of flour and water. Known as pilot bread or sea biscuits, they were produced along the coast and were sold mainly to sailors who used them as a sea-going staple. They kept well without refrigeration, but were bland, extremely hard, and had to be soaked in some sort of liquid to be made edible. As such, their popularity ebbed the further you went from the coastline.

Bakers of the day learned that by adding a shortening to the mix (butter, followed later by lard) their product wasn’t as hard and it had some taste. Others incorporated the tried-and-true method used in bread baking, adding a little salt, yeast, and baking soda, and the butter cracker, or soft cracker, was born. This new cracker became known as the Boston cracker. At about the same time, machinists in Boston and New York City began to manufacture machines that would
change cracker production forever.

A wide variety of crackers could be made on these machines, but the two most often mentioned early machine-made crackers were the round common cracker (as they quickly became known) and the square soda cracker. Both were identical, except for the shape. By the mid-1840s, these machines were widely available and any baker with $1,500 could get into the cracker manufacturing business. By 1885, at least ten steam-powered bakeries appeared throughout Vermont, most notably in Montpelier, St. Johnsbury, and in White River, while others began production in Burlington and Lamoille.

The crackers were simple to make. Bakers would take the dough, fold it multiple times to produce layers, and would feed the dough into a cutting machine, which punched out the individual crackers. Those crackers would then move to the oven, where they’d bake until finished. Once cool, they’d be packaged, often in boxes or barrels, where they’d be shipped off to the vast network of general stores throughout the state.

There were plenty of ways to eat the crackers, but one dish remained popular among old-time Vermonters, eating them with milk. In days of old, it was common to go to church on Sunday morning and then enjoy a big meal after church. Since Sunday evening was mother’s turn to rest, a simple meal was needed, and the tradition of crackers and milk was born. As the times changed, the common cracker fell out of favor in many households, but they can still be found in some pantries throughout the state.

This article originally appeared in the Fall/Winter 2022 issue of our member magazine, History Connections. To get it and support the Vermont Historical Society, sign up as a member.