INGREDIENTS
2 cups flour
3⁄4 cup water
1 tablespoon shortening
1⁄2 teaspoon salt
DIRECTIONS
1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.
2. Mix all ingredients together.
3. Turn onto a floured board and knead for five minutes.
4. Let dough rest for 10 minutes.
5. Roll out half of the dough to 1/4 inch thick.
6. Use the rim of a cup or bowl cut out 12 circles, each about 3" across.
7. Use a fork to prick the center of the circle a few times.
8. Arrange on 2 baking sheets and bake for 15 minutes.
9. Turn oven off and leave crackers in oven until completely cool.
In the context of panel 37, “Sensory methods for planetary survival,” I will offer a “tiny workshop” focused on Saloon Pilot Crackers, a form of hardtack manufactured in Honolulu by Diamond Bakery. This tasting is part of a multi-year arts-led project called Tasting History: Biscuits, Culture, and National Identity, takes taste as a research method for uncovering how ancient military rations cut across socioeconomic divides to become staples of mainstream diets. Diamond Bakery’s recipe uses lard to soften hardtack, also known as ship’s biscuits, army biscuits, cabin bread, kanpan, sea bread, and a host of other names. Hidegoro Murai, Kikutaro Hiruya and Natsu Muramoto founded Diamond Bakery in 1921. Several pilot cracker manufacturers have ceased production in recent years, including Nabisco’s Crown Pilot and Hilo Macaroni Factory’s pilot cracker. Diamond Bakery’s crackers are special, a little bit rare even. Hardtack arrived in Hawai’i with whaling and missionary ships. Saloon Pilot crackers carry material relations of multispecies environmental injustices experienced in these contexts. Crackers are also delicious and beloved, widely consumed, and adapted to cuisines around the world. Pilot Crackers are a site of everyday pleasures—for example, eating the crackers with guava jelly and condensed milk, or, as the author of the above recipe recounts, a childhood memory: “My parents would break the plain cracker up into a cup of coffee and milk and have it for breakfast.” Pilot Crackers are land and sea, whale and harpoon, they are more and more difficult to find and eat. They form digestive networks, following what Parama Roy describes as “the logic of permeability rather than of inviolability that often marks the workings of an alimentary order” (20). Writing about poi, Hi’ilei Julia Hobart describes the difference between tasting and thinking with the mouth and tasting and thinking with the stomach, finding that when eaters “think with their mouths, not their stomachs, …they consume a food rather than enact a genealogical connection” (143). Hobart’s distinction between consuming a food through the mouth versus enacting a genealogical connection through the stomach could model the how environmental justice might taste. Hardtack, often positioned as a bland and unremarkable substrate for other foods, has the capacity to juxtapose cultural practices of food and eating with genealogies and histories of injustice that can be tasted, felt, and digested.
References
Hobart, Hiʻilei Julia. “A ‘Queer-Looking Compound’: Race, Abjection, and the Politics of Hawaiian Poi.” Global Food History 3:2 (2017).
Roy, Parama. Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial. Durham, NC: Duke, 2010.
Recipe by J-Ha7037: https://www.food.com/recipe/saloon-hard-track-pilot-crackers-351299
Source:
Kelley, Lindsay. 2023. "Taste Workshop: Daimond Bakery, Honolulu, Hawai'i." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.
