Recipe: Spider Cornbread

I found an old recipe for "Spider Cornbread" when I was looking for vintage recipes for the blog.  No the recipe doesn't call for mashed spiders or cobwebs, instead spider was an old fashioned name for a skillet/frying pan, usually made of cast iron.  Ok so it's skillet cornbread is what we're getting at.  This recipe comes from a 1920 book for teaching young girls how to be proper homemakers. 

Update 9/15/23 - I know sugar in cornbread is a divisive thing in the south as is flour.  Flour was used in the original recipe to help combat Pellagra a Niacin deficiency, I have included an option using only fine grind cornmeal and omitting the flour.  You can choose to omit the sugar but it helps balance out the flavor and its nowhere near the sugar content of the sweet cake like cornbread you find in stores.  

Southern Cucumber Salad Relish

In the vintage era a relish was any kind of side item with a sour or sour sweet taste.  This term usually applied to pickles, chutney, piccalilli, etc.  We have changed the meaning in the modern era to mean chopped pickles added to hot dogs or various salads.  It was not uncommon to have a dill pickle with dinner as such practices were thought to aid in digestion which has some foundation in fact if the pickles are lacto fermented.  In this case I am sharing a family recipe for Cucumber Salad, a dish most often served with pork but I eat it with just about anything (ok not ice cream).  It's simple to make and tastes better the day after it's made so the flavors can meld together.  The last time I made it I stuck with organic cucumbers and it just tasted divine.  You don't need to use any special vinegar with it, just plain white vinegar will do fine.

Edited 04/17/2024: I revisited making this recipe after a long time and found some tweaks were needed so here is the updated recipe.

The Only Bread Recipe You'll Ever Need

Back in the old days, home cooks didn't trouble themselves trying to make artisan breads.  Sure you can spend a fortune on pans, rising baskets, flours, enhancers, etc trying to bake loaves like the professional bakeries put out but I have to ask why?  Most artisan breads are entirely unsuited to the one thing we will most be doing with them, making sandwiches.  I have many vintage cookbooks in my collection now and while here and there you encounter a recipe for French bread, noticeably absent are the ciabatta breads, sourdoughs, challah  breads and other loaves that are outside of the purvue of most home bakers.  Instead is a more practical approach meant to be frugal not topple you off the fiscal cliff in a unforgiving quest for the proper crumb size.

1925 Bread Pudding

     I was looking in my vintage cookbooks the other day and one that I haven't spent much time with is "A Calendar of Dinners" a Crisco sponsored cookbook from 1925.  It has dinner menu plans for an entire year with recipes to go along with most of the items on the various menus.  As I was paging through I found this recipe, now I've always been a fan of bread pudding but I rarely make it as a loaf of bread doesn't last in my house.  This one intrigued me though for 2 reasons, first, I had all the ingredients on hand.  It's a rare day that I find a recipe where I don't have to hunt for some ingredient.

The Ansonia Sunwatch & Instructions

     It's a rare day I come across an ad for something I actually own, especially when it's as rare as this gem.  The Sunwatch is a pocket sundial with a compass to orient yourself properly with the sun.  I just happen to have found one of these when I was cleaning out my dad's house and as far as I know, it belonged to my grandfather.

Oven Roasted Pork Shoulder

     Roasted pork has been around ever since we started killing wild boars in the forest in the dim beginnings of humanity so in that sense this is a "vintage" recipe but for our purposes here this recipe is all my own.  It is based on a Filipino recipe called Lechon sa Hurno which translates into "roasted in the oven".  It's a home based version of the popular party centerpiece Lechon Baboy or roasted pig where a whole pig is gutted and roasted for hours on a spit over an open fire.

1924 Fish Florentine Recipe

     This recipe comes from a 1924 edition of "Recipes For Everyday", a publication that was available though Crisco.  As you can imagine, Crisco is an ingredient in all of the recipes.  Now I don't have anything against Crisco, I use it when baking cakes because there really isn't a substitute but I don't want to eat it in everything everyday.

Boston Cream Pie, 1920 Recipe

     This is another recipe that comes from a 1920 Cookbook called "Recipes For Everyday" that was underwritten by Crisco.  Naturally all the recipes involve crisco in the ingredients but in this case I can an least agree with it because I think that Crisco makes for a good cake and icing.  Now this recipe is already perplexing you as the picture runs counter to the usual Boston Cream Pie we are used to today, i.e. a yellow cake with custard filling and a chocolate ganache icing.  I thought that at first as well but after trying this recipe I think I like it better than what we are used to.

Catsup or Ketchup?

When I was a kid growing up I remember that Heinz was the only "Ketchup" and everything else was "Catsup".  You have to laugh just saying the word catsup, as it sounds like something a sick cat would produce.  Since my grandparents were cheap frugal in a Great Depression sense they always had Del Monte Catsup on the table.  Now I prefer Heinz, as do alot of people and I'm so happy they came out with the Simply Heinz line that has no HFCS in it.

Graham Popovers

I don't usually do bread with dinner because of the time involved in kneading and proofing but this recipe is relatively easy and just needs less than an hour to bake.  We all know about popovers, those lovely baked morsels with a hollow center just begging to be full of melting butter.  Well this is a variation of that old recipe that I found in an old cookbook from 1920.  These are mix of Graham Flour (White Whole Wheat) and all purpose flour and while they can of course be baked in popover pans, they do equally as well in a regular muffin tin as seen above.

Spanish Sauce Recipe

This is part of a series of recipes that I'm going to call the "Miami" recipes because they all come from the Miami Daily News.  I was searching Google Archives for some new recipes and I happened upon the 1920's editions of the Miami News.  In addition to tons of great ads that make me sad for the effect of inflation on our wealth, they posted a daily recipe on the family section.  Most of these recipes are hardly noteworthy, or else I have them already in my other cookbooks, but some, a worthy few caught my eye and this was one of them.

Green Goddess Dressing Recipe

Green Goddess dressing can be traced back to 1923 when it was adapted from an original recipe dating back to the 1600's.  It was created and named in honor of a play by the same name featuring the actor George Arliss and enjoyed a revival in popularity in the 1970's when the dressing maker 7 Seas re-introduced it to the American market.  As with most things culinary it has been on a roller coaster ride of popularity tempered with indifference ever since.

Fair Wind and Calm Seas for the SS Cream of Wheat

 

Jack Sparrow he is not but a heady imagination always takes you to places of wondrous adventure.  This ad is from 1920 when the world of high fashion was transitioning into a more modern appeal.  His outfit actually would have been at home from 1900 onwards and boys wore short pants until they attained the age of manhood and could don their first pair of long pants.  

Pumpkin Meringue Pie Recipe

Pumpkin pie, what can be more traditional for Thanksgiving dessert than this?  Once there were many recipes for pumpkin pie but then came Libbey's canned pumpkin and the one recipe to rule them all.  I ate my fill of pumpkin pies made with the Libbey's recipe all my life and always wanted something different, something not covered in mounds of whipped cream and not as sweet.  Then I stumbled upon this recipe, dating from 1920.  Many pies we cover with whipped cream today were actually topped with meringue back in the early 1900's.  This recipe has been a huge winner with both me and my wife and even my family liked it.  It's a little more involved than your typical pumpkin pie but the result is worth it.  I get up early in the morning and make the crust from scratch then whip up the pie and have it baked and ready to go before I put the turkey in the oven.  You can make your own pumpkin puree or use canned but here's something to think about, Libbey's pumpkin is actually a variety of butternut squash, not really pumpkin.  Real pie pumpkin has a different texture and a slightly stronger taste. This recipe took first place in The Fresh Market's holiday recipe contest in 2014.

Chicken/Turkey Croquettes

I have written about Chicken Croquettes before here but that recipe hailed from the 1930's.  I found another recipe for the same thing but this one dated from 1920 and the overall ingredients were different from the 1930's recipe.  The first time I made these I used leftover chicken, but I tried them again with turkey and the end result it the same.  You can make a simple white sauce as an accompaniment to these or just have them as is.  The vintage way to have these would have been as a luncheon with some Lettuce Salad w/ Piquant Dressing and some Banana Walnut Bread.

Lettuce Salad With Piquant Dressing

Salads as we know them today were not common back in the vintage era.  Most of the time you had to use what was on hand and for a large part of the year the only lettuce to be had was iceberg.  I rather like iceberg lettuce even though it has earned an undeserved maligned reputation in recent years when compared to the much vaunted Romaine Lettuce.  What is important to remember is that the water content of iceberg lettuce is much higher and when that is taken into account the nutritional comparison actually evens out between the 2 contenders. 

Country Captain Southern Chicken Curry

I chose a rather laborious title for this post because most people don't know the Americanized version of chicken curry is rightfully called Country Captain Chicken.  Now the origins of this dish are veiled in the mists of time as it has been around since before the Civil War and quite a few towns make claim to Country Captain as being "their" dish.  After looking at literally dozens of recipes dating from now all the way back to 1822 I can say with a high amount of confidence that this dish is a New Orleans Creole recipe.  You can usually tell the background of a recipe by it's base ingredients and Creole cooking is one of the easier ones to spot as almost all dishes start with at least 2 of the "Trinity", bell peppers, onions and celery.  These ingredients showed up time and again in each recipe I looked at, albeit with some variations as time went forward.  I picked a recipe that was simple and stayed close to the original in terms of ingredients and flavor.

The Yeast Eaters

Yes, you will know the people who eat yeast by their rosy complexions and giant bows they wear.  After the demise of the quack medical tonics we had to start promoting something else that would be a panacea of health and vitality, why not yeast?  I see these ads pop up with some regularity so there must have been a popular movement for consuming yeast, something akin to the cayenne pepper movement of the 1850's I shouldn't wonder.  As for the yeast it's just normal bread yeast or in this case compressed yeast cakes as instant rise type yeasts we use today weren't available. 

Searching For Perfection

Wow, this ad looks safe... where's Social Services? Oh yeah, it's 1920 and they don't exist yet. I love the disinterested look on the mother's face as little Suzy reaches frighteningly close to a pot of boiling oil in which mom is cooking doughnuts, presumably for breakfast the following morning. Indeed the stove seems to be a bunch of contradictions since it's 4 o'clock in the afternoon according to the clock on the wall and mother is cooking a roast in the oven, doughnuts in the pot and on the simmer is a pot of cereal (presumably some form of oats). All this actually makes sense when taken in through the eyes of early 20th century cooking styles. While quick oats were introduced in 1920, it would take some time before the market accepted them. So these were regular oats or more likely steel cut oats (ala Johnny McAnn's) which were cooked over a double boiler for many hours until done. In this time period, in order to save time at breakfast, mother would cook the oats the night before and reheat them for breakfast.

Eggplant Creole

Note: This recipe has been edited 12/18/14 from the original as I finally got it to come together the way the original was supposed to look like when finished.

This recipe is from a Crisco sponsored cookbook printed in the early 1920's.  When I first saw it I expected something spicy, after all it's Creole and Louisiana is known for it's fiery foods but in this case Creole seems to be mean cooked with tomatoes.  I made this recipe the way the original was laid out but immediately saw the need for some changes as the cooking directions are rather vague as vintage recipes are wont to be and it also calls for the boiling of the eggplant which was something of a disaster (We now boil the eggplant, see below).  Keep this in mind when you make it that this is the modified, kitchen tested recipe which is what sets this blog apart from other vintage recipe sites.  This recipe was a side dish in it's original form but by the 1930's the Great Depression had turned it into a main dish.  I ate it with a poached egg on top and it is both a nutritious and filling meal that doesn't cost that much.  This recipe lived on into the 1960's where it appears again in another of my cookbooks returning to it's roots as a side dish.