During Sunday’s post-basketball visit to the grocery store, one of the items I was picking up was a box of what I grew up referring to as “soda crackers,” i.e. saltines.
Soda crackers is just what the Lundeberg family called them, just like our term for the bug that looks kind of like a miniature armadillo was “pill bug” whereas other folks I knew described them as “sow bugs” or “potato bugs.” None of those really makes much sense to me; armadillo bugs seems a lot more appropriate.
An aside: We Lundebergs referred to this funky, fast-growing, big-leafed tree off our back patio as the “elephant tree,” I guess because of the huge leaves, but I learned later that kind of flora is actually known as an empress tree.
Anyway, knowing that the correct name for those aforementioned crackers is in fact saltines, I asked a couple people what they referred to them as. Both just said, “crackers.” That to me seems a bit too general — as in, what about Triscuits, Wheat Thins, Chicken in a Bisket? Are they not every bit as much of a cracker as saltines/crackers/soda crackers.
If memory serves, most of the people I grew up around called them soda crackers, though I had no idea what the origin of the “soda” part of that was until just now, when I did about 45 seconds of Web research and learned they contain baking soda.
I figured it was either that or that they were intended to be eaten as an accompaniment to soda, the drink, but I didn’t really think it could be the latter because in Milwaukie — and pretty much everywhere else in Oregon, I think — people in the 1960s and ’70s referred to soft drinks as “pop,” not soda.
Anyway, what’s your term for those crackers, those bugs, that tree, those drinks, etc.?
Btw, my personal favorite ways of eating soda crackers are:
– With peanut butter, while drinking beer.
– In chili, while drinking beer.
– Plain, also while drinking beer.
Maybe I should start calling them “beer crackers.”
