Ellington

Have you ever eaten odds and ends? I'll wager not. I'll go so far as to bet you cannot even guess what makes up odds and ends.

Give up? A snack of raisins, cheddar cheese and crackers—that's what Grandma called odds and ends back when the guys were little boys. It's a memorable combination of tastes and textures—the sweet chewiness of the raisins, the density and pungent flavor of cheese at room temperature and the crisp, slight saltiness of a saltine.

My Mama always buys Nabisco Premium Saltines, the same kind that you can find in many restaurants. If I'm eating out on a cool night—yes, Virginia, there really are cool nights in our beloved Mississippi—a grilled cheese sandwich and a cup of chili loaded with jalapenos at Hal & Mal's or Country Potato Soup at Flashbacks in Byram goes mighty good with saltines.

Crackers are a multi-billion-dollar business according to the Biscuit and Cracker Manufacturers' Association, established Nov. 11, 1902, when regional bakeries were gaining ground over local mom-and-pop shops and the phenomenon known as brand identification was hooking housewives.
Crackers go way back before that, though. According to Food Timeline.org, Ancient Middle Easterners ate small, hard biscuit-like foods. Just like today's crackers, they filled you up and were easy to take from Point A to Point B, which led, of course, to soldiers consuming cracker-like foodstuffs. Roman legionnaires ate biscotti, twice-baked biscuits; Admiral Nelson's British sailors ate ship's biscuits, a three-times-baked hardtack; and Union Civil War soldiers ate a dried biscuit hardtack, known as tooth dullers or sheet iron crackers, according to the Gettysburg National Military Park's Kidzpage on Civil War Food. To make hardtack edible, soldiers crumbled it into a skillet along with fried salt pork, a dish they called skillygallee—sort of makes the name odds and ends sound less odd, doesn't it?

The baking of crackers was one of the America's first food industries with the finished product packed into barrels and sold in bulk to general stores. Still, some homemakers liked to do it themselves—here's a 1901 recipe for soda crackers from "The Picayune's Creole Cookbook," just in case you're feeling adventurous, especially since the kids are out of school and looking for something to do.

Soda Crackers (Biscuits de Soda)
1 quart flour
3 T. butter
2 C. sweet milk or water
1/2 t. soda
1 t. salt

Sift the flour several times, and add the salt. Mix well. Then rub in the butter thoroughly. Add the soda, which you will have dissolved in a little boiling water, and the milk and mix all well together. Then knead well and put upon the biscuit board and beat with a rolling pin for upwards of half an hour, frequently rolling the dough over, and beating hard until the air bubbles cover every part, above and below. Then roll out into a nice square, even sheet of dough, about one eighth of an inch in thickness, and cut into nice square cakes. Stick through and through with a fork here and there over the surface in even rows, and bake them in a moderate oven till they are hard and crisp, but not brown. Then hang in a muslin bag for about two days to thoroughly dry, and they are ready to be served."