Ghoulies and Ghosties and 8-legged Beasties

I have a six-leg limit. Anything with six legs or less is okay. Anything with more completely creeps me out. Nothing like a grown woman shrieking and blasting an itty bitty spider in her bathroom with about half a can of hairspray and then making someone else go wipe it up. Being hyper-vigilant for spiders, I couldn't help but notice this recipe for Spider Corn Cake. I thought, maybe its a festive Hallowe'en dessert, or, given the 100+ age of this Perfection Stove Company cook book, it wasn't inconceivable to me that it would be some means of salvaging your store of cornmeal after the bugs had gotten to it.

But no. On reading it I saw that you cook the batter in something called a spider. What the heck is that? Turns out its like an skillet pan but with sloping sides and a rounded bottom instead of flat, and it stands up on three legs. Why? So you can bake over hot coals, just nestle it in there. I've never heard of this before. And apparently the name is purely American in origin and kind of stuck so that even when the pan itself was modified into our modern flat bottomed pan, to go with the new high tech invention of a stove top, the name went with it. So really this is just a recipe for cornbread cooked in a cast iron skillet.

And, yes, I just happen to have one. But now I feel an excursion to the antique mall is in order. I have no children today...

Spider Corn Cake
3/4 c corn meal and flour to fill the cup
1 c sweet milk
1/2 cup sour milk
1 T sugar
1/2 t salt
1/2 t soda (scant)
1 egg
1 T butter
Mix meal, flour, salt, sugar, and soda. Beat the egg; add 1/2 of the sweet milk and all of the sour milk. Stir this into the dry mixture. Melt the butter in a hot spider and pour the mixture into it. Pour the remaining 1/2 c of sweet milk over the top, but do not stir in. Bake 20 minutes. Start with highest flame, and reduce to medium or lower in case there should be a tendency to burn.