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Spider Corn Cake
1 teaspoon salt teaspoon soda 2 eggs cup sweet milk Mix and sift dry ingredients twice; add well-beaten egg and cream; beat well. Butter an agate pan; heat very hot; pour in mixture; pour milk on top. Bake thirty minutes. 1 cup flour 1 cup milk
The text as printed is scrambled — the ingredient list has been broken up and set out of order, and the cornmeal that gives the cake its name is missing altogether. Read it as a template rather than a working formula.
- What a spider isA spider was originally a cast-iron frying pan with three legs, made to stand over hearth coals; in New England the name stuck to ordinary skillets long after the legs disappeared. Any heavy 9- or 10-inch cast-iron skillet with an ovenproof handle does the job.
- "Agate pan"Agate ware was speckled enamel over sheet steel, sold under that trade name from the late nineteenth century. It heats fast and thin, so cast iron is the better substitute here — the point of the instruction is a pan preheated until the butter sizzles.
- The missing cornmealRecipes under this name combine cornmeal and flour, often in comparable quantities, though the proportions vary from book to book. As set here only the flour survives, along with a doubled and split milk quantity. Use a complete version of the recipe for proportions.
- "Sweet milk" and sodaSweet milk simply means fresh, unsoured milk. Soda alone in sweet milk has nothing to react with, so a workable version needs either sour milk or buttermilk against the soda, or baking powder in its place — another sign of what has dropped out of this printing.
- The milk poured on topThis is the hinge of the dish and the reason it is worth making. A cup of milk (or cream) flooded over the batter in the hot pan and not stirred in sinks partway and sets as a custard stripe through the middle of the baked cake. Pour it gently and do not disturb it.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Corn cake of this type suits a hot oven; something around 425F is a reasonable modern equivalent, with the pan preheated, and thirty minutes should suit a 10-inch skillet, the top deeply browned.
- Serving and yieldOne skillet cuts into six or eight wedges. It is a supper bread, best eaten hot from the pan with butter; the custard layer does not keep well.
Spider cake belongs to the New England hearth: a batter of cornmeal and flour poured into a screaming-hot greased iron pan, with a slosh of milk or cream added last so the finished bread carries a soft custard seam through its middle. Recipes under this name appear across late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American household books, and the dish is generally traced to the older practice of baking corn bread in a legged skillet set among the coals rather than in an oven. Its presence in Lowney's Cook Book — a general household manual issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate maker, and so full of chocolate work in its later chapters — is a reminder that these promotional cookbooks were expected to cover the whole range of plain New England cooking, breads included, and not merely the products of the firm that paid for them.