Jacob's cream cracker

The Jacob's cream cracker is a plain, unadorned square of flour, fat and salt, first baked in 1885 by W&R Jacob, a biscuit-making firm two Quaker brothers had founded in Waterford, Ireland, in 1851.

The Jacob family of Waterford

William and Robert Jacob were born into a Quaker family running a small bakery on Bridge Street in Waterford. Like most Quakers of the period, they were barred from university, the law, medicine and public office.

These professions required an oath of allegiance, which Quakers would not swear. They believed all speech should be equally truthful, not reserved for oath-bound occasions.

Trade remained open to them. Biscuit-making already had a Quaker pedigree, as the well-known firm of Carrs, of Carlisle, worked in it before Jacob's began. In 1851 William and Robert turned their family bakery into a biscuit-making business of their own. They relocated it to Dublin two years later.

Innocent Trades

Shut out of the professions, Quakers did not simply go into business. They gravitated toward what became known as 'Innocent Trades'. These were useful, everyday goods, free of violence, luxury or vanity.

Weapons and armaments were the clearest line they would not cross. Finery and vanity goods were avoided too.

The Darby family's ironworks at Coalbrookdale, which later cast the Irish Famine pots, followed the same pattern. As the Industrial Revolution brought mass production within reach, Quaker firms were often the ones putting it to work.

Jacob's new Dublin factory was fitted with steam-powered travelling ovens. These carried uncooked biscuits through the heat on a conveyor belt, advanced machinery for its time.

The business grew accordingly. By 1912 the firm had acquired land at Aintree, near Liverpool, and opened a second factory there in 1914. By 1916 the Dublin site alone employed some 3,000 workers, one of the largest employers in the city.

A plain biscuit

The cracker itself carries the same instinct, just in edible form. Quaker Plainness is best known through plain dress and unadorned Meeting Houses. It shows up here too, in what was left out.

No sugar, no icing, no flavouring: just flour, fat, salt and a raising agent, 'creamed' together and baked until crisp. One contemporary account described it as, “Extremely light, rich and flakey.”

Popularity proved no obstacle to plainness, nor plainness to popularity. By 1893 the cracker's reputation had reached as far as Berlin, where Prince Frederick Leopold of Germany ordered six tins sent to him personally. Today, more than a billion Jacob's cream crackers are consumed each year.

Jacob's cream cracker still sits on tables largely unchanged since 1885 — the same four humble ingredients, baked the same simple way, a century and a half on. A small, dry square of dough that argues, quietly, that plainness was never a limitation. It was simply the point.