Oyster? I hardly know 'er!

Oyster crackers.  They're fairly ubiquitous, especially in New England.  I've been eating them for years, especially in chowders and the like.  Eventually, it occurred to me to wonder why they're called oyster crackers-- they're certainly not made from oysters, after all, the way oyster sauce is.

It turns out that the etymology of the name is actually somewhat opaque, lost in the mists of time.  But the general consensus seems to be that they are not named so because they look like closed oysters (they don't, really), but simply that they were originally very popular in oyster stew¹.

¹http://books.google.com/books?id=6N8XAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA346#v=onepage&q&f=false