If there is a snack food that is quintessentially English, I think it could be summed up in a water biscuit and yet, look to their origins and you realise that they are an improvement on a pretty miserable ration from Britain’s seafaring days.

You’ll find quite a few references online to “hardtack” as a simple type of biscuit or cracker, made from two, perhaps three basic ingredients – flour, water, and perhaps salt or some sort of seasoning. Hardtack is cheap and durable. A great relatively light unperishable food suitable for travellers and very common as part of military and navy rations. If kept dry, it can be stored for ages and still be edible unless it contains oils that will go rancid.

I had always associated the hard part of hardtack as being something related to navy rations but I always thought the “hard” part was associated with alcohol and rum rations, it was only recently that I was informed and discovered that it is in fact those biscuits.

The tack is supposedly sailor slang for “food” especially low grade food it appears but I am not sure on that definition .

The concept “Hard tack” first appeared in print in English in 1836 but you could argue with a little deconstruction that the concept of this simple cracker has been around at least since biblical times if you consider that the humble unleavened Passover cracker – the kosher Matzo is simply made from flour and water.

As a child, I remember that a favourite morning or afternoon tea snack would often involve water crackers as we knew them, smeared with butter, dabbed with some marmite and then adorned with a sprinkling of grated cheddar. These were a rare treat.

If water crackers weren’t available then it would be water biscuits but these were less preferable as they were larger, thicker and didn’t quite have the same crispy crunch – in fact the more I think about them, the more convinced I am, that they are just a bastardized version of navy hardtack.

A special treat was matzo crackers, great sheets of crispy deliciousness to be smeared with soft butter and lashings of marmite and cheese. They have these perforations too, which as a child I always found wonderous. The significance of the Passover and matzo crackers and their relevance was kind of lost on me being brought up in the Christian faith.

Passover didn’t feature significantly in our lives but our grocer, who was Jewish of course stocked these and other rare delicacies for the local Orthodox community at the appropriate times of the year. We simply appropriated these foodstuffs because we liked them. Matzo and schmaltz …..hmmmmm.

One of the disadvantages of both the water biscuits and the water crackers were that if left out for too long in the rainy season, they would get a little soft, and if left in their packaging and not in an airtight container, they would almost certainly get invaded by weevils.

When I first went to the United States in the early 1980s and encountered clam chowder in Boston I was amazed at the tiny little crackers that were offered to be added to the chowder to give it more texture. They were in my mind at least simply small water crackers Know as saltines or soda crackers they are also made of white flour but are leavened with yeast, and baking soda. In some respects the water biscuits of my youth seem to have been more like these than water crackers.

When I lived in the Middle East naturally, the Matzo cracker didn’t feature on the supermarket shelves, but water biscuits, water crackers and a new encounter Skyflakes, became an integral part of the pantry snacks we would have in our weekly shop.

Skyflakes could be bought in large traditional tins and though I didn’t realise it at the time, I subsequently learned that they are a classic Philippine brand manufactured by M.Y San Biscuits. Today the company is known as Monde M.Y. SAN Corporation and they’re famous for Lion Soda Crackers, Fita, Skyflakes, Butter Cookies, and Graham Crackers. Today that awesome tin is now replaced with a plastic tub.

Today our relationship with the water cracker is a bit on and off. At Christmas time, Jacob’s, a renowned UK brand for biscuits and crackers, rolls out a plastic two layer box of mixed crackers, at about a fiver you think you are getting a lot of crackers, but it is deceptive, from the outside it looks like a lot – there is a lot of padding inside.

Almost every cracker and biscuit in that box go well with a slice of mature cheddar or a sliver of brie but the box lasts long after Christmas unless someone goes hog wild and munches through a bunch on a binge.

Though we don’t cognitively add crackers to the grocery shop, every now and then a box of Jacob’s or Carr’s appears in the pantry as an impulse buy by someone. Both brands now belong to United Biscuits it seems. I am not sure I know how I eel about this monopoly.

Though, now, studying the ingredients I am wondering whether this is still a good idea although the basic ingredients are the same, why is there palm oil in here? Where is this palm oil coming from?

My mind immediately goes to Borneo, Malaysia and Indonesia and to the Orangutans and the fact that the majority of the world’s palm oil sources negatively impact their habitat.

Perhaps the time has come to rethink the water cracker!