Take a large helping of cheesy nibbles, add a dollop of shag pile, combine with a hearty splash of Demis Roussos and you've got the perfect recipe for the Seventies dinner party. But while guests tucked into something creatively constructed out of artificial cream and glacé cherries, a rustling could be heard behind the scenes. For there was one other ingredient that no self-respecting chiffon-clad hostess could do without: the Jacob's Cream Cracker.
Jacob's crackers were to the cheeseboard what Peters was to Lee. And the familiar orange packet was as common at formal dinner occasions as the prawn cocktail and talk of David Essex's chest hair. By the end of a successful evening of entertaining there was not a moist mouth left in the house. At the height of their popularity they were the UK's top cracker, commanding a 50 per cent share of the market. The brand has proved such a hit with the British public that it's packaging has remained virtually unchanged for more than a century.
But why - when the French have always done it with a crusty baguette, the Greeks with nuts, and the Italians prefer it solo - do we have our cheese with a square of dry, hard wafer? One possibility is that our passion for the cracker stems from the days of Victorian restraint, when spicy foods were commonly believed to lead you to the heights of depravity. Evidently, tastelessness was next to godliness. Combine a bit of feisty Cheddar and pickle with something bland and you staunch the swelling tide of immorality, perhaps?
Despite its immense popularity with British cheese-lovers, however, the cracker is not as quintessentially English as you might expect. The cracker originates from America, where every well-stocked general store had a barrel of them to rifle through. They were cheap and easy to produce and were even thought to, ahem, keep you regular. Then William Jacob got wind of them and the Cream Cracker was born in his Dublin factory in 1885, from where they were packed in airtight cartons and shipped to homesick Britons around the world.
These days, despite our Gallic cousins' preference for something crusty with their Brie, Jacob's is owned by French food giant Danone. And, although the brand is still top cracker in the UK,
it seems our tastes are becoming more sun-dried and Italian than dry and crumbly. Not content
to let our enthusiasm wane for this classic, however, Jacob's is now making things more exotic with a Mediterranean range. If that wasn't enough, we're being encouraged to cast aside
the Wensleydale for a bit of Mozzarella and tapenade instead. The Victorians would not be amused, but it looks as if our love affair with the cracker is far from drying up.