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Susie's Spider Corn Cake
1 1/4 cups corn meal 2 cups sour milk 1 teaspoon soda 1 teaspoon salt 2 eggs 2 tablespoons butter Mix soda, salt, and corn meal; gradually add eggs well beaten and milk. Heat frying-pan, grease sides and bottom of pan with butter, turn in the mixture, place on middle grate in hot oven, and cook twenty minutes.
A plain New England corn bread baked in a skillet, with no wheat flour and no sugar. Nearly everything depends on the pan being hot and greased before the batter hits it.
- What a spider isA spider was originally a cast-iron frying pan on three short legs, made to stand over coals. By the date of this book the word simply meant a heavy frying-pan; use a 9- or 10-inch cast-iron skillet.
- Heat the pan firstThe instruction to heat the pan and butter it before turning in the batter is the hinge of the recipe. A cold pan gives a pale, damp bottom; a properly heated one sets a crisp brown crust the moment the batter lands.
- Oven temperatureA hot oven in this period is usually reckoned at somewhere around 400-450F. Twenty minutes at that heat is plausible for a batter this thin; test with a straw or skewer in the center.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, which no longer exists in the shops. Buttermilk is the standard substitute, cup for cup, and supplies the acid the soda needs.
- SodaOne teaspoon of soda is baking soda, sold as saleratus in older books. Mix it thoroughly through the dry cornmeal, as the recipe directs, or it will streak the crumb with bitter yellow patches.
- CornmealStone-ground yellow or white meal, rather than a fine degerminated grind, is likely closer to the texture intended here. With 2 cups of liquid to 1 1/4 cups of meal the batter will be loose and pourable rather than spoonable.
- No flour, no sugarWith no wheat flour and no sugar the result is plainer and less sweet than modern corn muffins. The recipe says nothing about serving, though hot with butter alongside a meal is the usual way with such breads.
- YieldA 10-inch skillet gives roughly six to eight wedges; the recipe itself states no yield. Like most corn breads it is best eaten hot.
Spider corn cake belongs to the New England cornmeal tradition, in which the skillet did the work an oven pan does now. The three-legged spider stood in the hearth with coals raked around it, and the name survived the hearth: cooks went on calling a flat-bottomed frying-pan a spider well into the twentieth century. Some recipes of this type call for cream or milk to be poured over the batter just before baking, which sinks and forms a custardy seam through the middle; this version has no such step and relies on sour milk and soda for lift. The attribution to Susie is the sort of household credit found in American cookbooks of the period, where recipes circulated between families and were named for whoever brought them into the house.