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Susie's Spider Corn Cake
1¼ 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 skillet cornbread baked in a preheated cast-iron pan. The batter is thin and eggy, closer to a batter pudding than to modern sweetened cornbread.
- The hinge: a screaming-hot greased panThe frying-pan must be heated and buttered before the batter goes in, so the bottom and sides set instantly into a crust. Pouring into a cold pan gives a pale, sodden cake.
- "Spider"A spider is a cast-iron frying pan, originally one with three short legs for standing over coals. Any 9- or 10-inch cast-iron skillet does the job; the pan must be ovenproof, handle included.
- Hot ovenRead "hot oven" as roughly 400-450F. Twenty minutes at that heat suits a batter this thin; test that the centre is set and no longer wet.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk here means naturally soured raw milk, acidic enough to react with the teaspoon of soda. Use cultured buttermilk cup for cup; ordinary milk left out will spoil rather than sour and will leave the soda tasting soapy.
- Corn mealFine or medium stone-ground yellow or white meal, not degerminated coarse grits and not self-rising cornmeal mix, which already carries leavening and salt.
- Butter quantityThe two tablespoons are for greasing the pan, not for the batter. Use them generously on sides as well as bottom; whatever is not absorbed enriches the crust.
- Yield and servingOne 9- to 10-inch skillet, six to eight wedges. Serve straight from the pan while hot, cut in wedges, with butter; it stiffens badly as it cools.
Skillet corn cakes of this kind were breakfast bread across much of nineteenth-century America, and Fannie Farmer's book collects several variants side by side, distinguished mainly by whether they use sweet or sour milk. The name comes from the vessel: a spider was a long-handled cast-iron frying pan, once made with legs so it could stand in the ashes, and the word survived in American kitchens long after the legs did. The pale, unsweetened, soda-risen result belongs to a plainer tradition than the sugared batters that became standard later, though how that tradition maps onto Northern and Southern practice is contested; the New England "spider cake", with a stripe of custard through the middle from milk poured over the batter just before baking, is a near-neighbour recipe of the same period and idiom.