FEW pantry items can inflame an entire island, let alone a region. But not many snack foods have a history and following like that of the Crown Pilot cracker.
A white rectangular cracker, the Crown Pilot has long been a staple in New England homes.
Nabisco, its manufacturer, discontinued it in 1996. But after months of hue and cry by loyal cracker crunchers – many of them among Chebeague Island's 350
year-round residents – the company brought the product back in early 1997 in an elaborate ceremony aboard a ship in Boston Harbour.
All was safe, people thought, until a few months ago when Kraft Foods, which owns Nabisco, again discontinued the cracker. Now people on Chebeague and throughout Maine are again rallying the old troops, calling the company daily and even floating the idea of a fundraising event to help efforts to get the cracker back.
"What if the Southerners had to go without their hominy grits? There'd be a big uprising there," said an island resident, Sylvia Ross, who has been eating Pilot crackers for most of her 76 years. "Now all of the sudden we can't get Pilots any more. What else are we to do?"
Once again, Donna Damon, a substitute teacher, is spearheading the Crown Pilot cause. The goal, Damon said, is to either have Kraft Foods reintroduce the cracker or give the recipe to a local bakery which can make and sell the crackers.
"People up and down the coast have been calling me," Damon said. "It's the buzz right now. We did this once before. We have the passion and tradition to do it again."
Kraft Foods, however, does not have the same desire.
"We do not have plans to bring the product back," said a spokeswoman, Laurie Guzzinati. She said demand for Pilot crackers was now half of what it was 12 years ago.
"Unfortunately, we no longer manufacture the Crown Pilot crackers," Guzzinati said. "The size of the Crown Pilot business declined so much we are no longer able to produce it. We have seen that folks in that region have highlighted how there is a very loyal customer base, but even within that region demand for the product has declined significantly."
But don't tell that to people on Chebeague, a small island whose only connection to the mainland is a 15-minute ferry ride. "It's a staple on Chebeague," Ross said. "It's been passed down through the generations. It's Pilot crackers everybody wants to put in their chowders and their fish stews."
A managing partner at the Chebeague Island Inn, Ed Jarrett, agrees. He planned the entire dinner menu for the inn's restaurant around Pilot crackers – all of the restaurant's seafood stuffings contained the crackers, and they were the base for all five of its soups.
"It put a major scrimp in what I was planning," Jarrett said. "It was in our baked stuffed lobster, baked stuffed haddock, all of our soups.
"I wanted to put that story of the island and the Pilot crackers into our menu. The vision got crushed."
"If we have to do a phone bank with 1,000 people calling Nabisco, we'll do it," Jarrett said. "Whatever it takes to get the cracker back."
May Hall and other residents are dialling away. "The operator asked me where I was from," Hall said. "I started to spell Chebeague, but the operator already knew how."
Residents are also frantically trying to replicate the recipe in their kitchens – the secret ingredient is molasses, they say – but with little success.
Cal Hancock of the Hancock Gourmet Lobster Co, which used to include Pilot crackers with its chowders and sell boxes of them on its website, sold out (at $3.69 a box) less than 24 hours after word of the Pilot's demise spread.
"The thing I remember most about Pilots is my dad getting up in the middle of the night and going down to the kitchen and having a Pilot cracker with peanut butter," Hancock said.
"You always have at least one box of Pilot crackers in the house, no question. They're bland, but I have a box at home, and I'm savouring it."
The full article contains 703 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
