In two previous articles, I explained how we Americans started referring to the British biscuit as a “cookie” and the origin of the words biscuit and cracker. In this article, I want to move on to a possibly confusing type of “cracker” called “hard tack” or “ship’s bread.” Isn’t this the same thing as a cracker in America?
Hard Tack or “Ship’s Bread”
One of the first, if not the first, cracker manufacturing businesses in the United States was the firm of Theodore Pearson in Newburyport, Massachusetts, beginning in 1792.
Pearson’s crackers were large, round, crisp and not exactly refined crackers which were known as “pilot” or as “ship” bread, as well as “hard tack.” These were popular with merchant marines who welcomed any type of food that would keep for a long period aboard a ship, and ordinary bread perished quickly.
Image by Infrogmation via Wikimedia
An early competitor of Pearson was Joshua Bent, who had a cracker baking operation in Milton, Massachusetts in 1801. It only operated three days a week, being worked by Bent and some of his family, and then the cracker were sold by wagon the rest of the week, and delivered to various points throughout the country.
This was the start of the famous Bent’s water-cracker, which has an international reputation and is still made with the same recipe today, by an unleavened dough of flour, water, and salt.
These products were sold in general stores out of open barrels, which is where the term cracker barrel came from, even though we never sell crackers out of barrels today.
After this early period, and throughout the 1800s, scores of cracker baking companies sprang up, mostly on the East Coast.
The advent of machines for automating the dough flattening process set the cracker business on fire. Demand for crackers was also helped along by the gold rush of 1849, and other pioneering movements, where the cracker seemed ideally suited for a long haul across the country.
At this time, besides distinctly local creations, there were five main types of “hard bread” or crackers being sold in mass, the pilot of ship’s bread, the Bent’s water cracker, the soft or butter cracker, and the soda cracker.
The last three were actually from fermented dough and contained shortening, making them lighter and softer than the old ship’s bread, and thus more popular.
It wasn’t until after 1855 that the fancy sweetened English “biscuit” came to the states, from firms such as Huntley and Palmer, Peak, Frean and Company, and Belcher and Larrabee.
English importers, however, found their products selling so well, and so widely, that they soon began to set up manufacturing locations within the United States and before long, English importation all but fizzled out.
In fact, the trade even reversed direction, so that several American firms like Holmes and Coutts, the Wilsons, and F.A. Kennedy began to sell high-end unsweetened products to the European market. After a while, the smaller firms began consolidating into several large firms
The New York Biscuit Company was formed in 1890 in Chicago, from 23 firms, nearly all the cracker firms in New York and the New England states. It became the largest and most complete operation in the country.
The America Biscuit and Manufacturing Company was formed that same year from a number of Midwestern firms.
A fierce price war began between these two companies, but in 1898 they united to form the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco), under the management of Adophus W. Green. Many plants were closed and many products were dropped, as Green planned to concentrate production on the soda cracker.
The company settled on “Uneeda Biscuit” as the name of its flagship product, and the “In-Er-Seal” waxed paper wrapper was developed to keep the crackers fresh.
By 1908 the company was also selling the Fig Newton, ZuZu Ginger Snaps, Graham Crackers, Premium soda Crackers or Saltines, Social Tea Biscuits (sweet), oyster crackers called Oysterettes, Animal Crackers, Arrowroot crackers, Zwieback, and sugar wafers called Nabiscos.
“Out of the Cracker Barrel –
From Animal Crackers to ZuZus
The little boy in the advertisement, wearing a raincoat, was Gordon Stiles, the five-year-old nephew of an advertising writer. This image of the rain-slicker-clad boy became universally familiar.
Why the rain gear? It was to emphasize the fact that the crackers wouldn’t be ruined by water, since they were sealed safely inside a “sanitary, waxed, air and moisture-proof package.”
If images of the Morton Salt Girl come to mind, you would be forgiven for thinking that one company copied the other. In this case, it would have to be Morton who copied Nabisco, since the Morton ads came later.
However, the Morton girl’s being shown in the rain was not a random attempt to play off an earlier advertising icon; it was to emphasize the idea that Morton’s Salt was the only brand that would not become sticky in humid weather.