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.  

1950's "Church" Banana Bread

I admit I always hated banana bread with a passion.  The dense, door stop quality, pudding consistency breads of my youth were just over the top with banana flavor and nothing else.  Coupled with an evil tendency to flare up my heartburn I soon shied away from banana bread for good.  You can imagine my discomfiture the other day when my wife said "Let's make banana bread".  "Yeah sure, I'll make it but you can eat it, I hate the stuff."  So as with anything else my wife suggests to eat I immediately spring into action with a search for a vintage recipe.  The only problem is there is no vintage recipe for banana bread.

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.

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.

Sour Cream Cornmeal Muffins

Many nights I end up doing fly by the seat of my pants meals.  I know what the main dish will be but the sides are always a mystery until I start diving into my vintage cookbooks and coming up with a plan.  This is one of those recipes that comes by way of the "Rumford Dainties and Household Helps" cookbook from 1922.  It needed some tweaking as Sour Cream was different back then from the thick stuff we use on our potatoes now so we have to add a little milk or risk a dry muffin at the end.  They went well with our dinner that night and I think you'll like them too.

Classic French Quarter Beignets

I lived in New Orleans for 6 months way back in the 90's, sharing an apartment with a friend who lived there full time in the French Quarter.  I developed a love for the city of New Orleans but none so much as my love of chicory coffee and beignets.  Now I've been drinking chicory coffee for some time now but never gave much thought to the little square doughnuts of Jackson Square until my wife and I went into a small deli/diner one morning in search of breakfast.  It was there I rekindled my passion for beignets and inflamed a new one in my wife.  The diner had 2 drawbacks though, they were using boxed Cafe du Monde Beignet Mix and they were expensive, charging $5.99 for an order of 3.  Well, I can do anything I put my mind to and that goes for making my own beignets as well.  For a real beignet experience you need cottonseed oil for frying as it has the most neutral flavor and you need powdered sugar for dusting.  Unfortunately these 2 items are the most compromised ingredients these days as all cottonseed oil is GMO and powdered sugar has a disgustingly off taste from the ever increasing amount of cornstarch (from GMO corn) that they add to prevent caking.  Fortunately I was able to get around both issues.  First the oil needs to be changed to peanut oil and not just any peanut oil but Planters peanut oil.  Their oil has an almost cottonseed oil quality about it in that the flavor is not peanutty or worse an insipid taste of rancid peanuts.  Next, and I don't know if this is distributed everywhere but I can get it here in Florida, for the powdered sugar use Florida Crystals Organic.  Still has cornstarch (organic corn), but it's so small a touch that it doesn't impact the flavor at all.  Speaking of flavor, this powdered sugar is less sweet than what you're used to but has an incredible depth of flavor to it not to be found anywhere else (that I've seen).  So without further fanfare, on to the recipe.  This recipe is cut in half from normal recipes but still yields around 10 servings of 3 beignets each.

"Topo Pino" Currant Muffins

This recipe comes by way of a cookbook from the 1920's titled "Rumford Dainties and Household Helps" that I picked up on Ebay.  The recipe itself is called Topo Pino Blueberry Muffins but I lacked in Blueberries so used currants instead.  If using blueberries use 1 cup fresh but I advise against using any from Chile as foreign produce is so suspect in the chemicals it may contain.

Recipe: Graham Bread

I've been hunting down vintage recipes for years now, ever since my mother gave me a copy of "The White House Cookbook, 1888" for Christmas.  One of the things I had always come across in bread making is "Graham Bread" which involved the use of Graham Flour.  Interesting stuff and I knew it didn't involve the use of crushed Graham Crackers but I never devoted myself to figuring out the secret to this type of flour until recently. 

I had found many references to Graham flour as just being an old term for Whole Wheat Flour, and that indeed seemed the case if it wasn't for recipes for Whole Wheat Bread sharing space alongside of recipes for Graham Bread.  The breakthrough came rather recently when I discovered a tidbit about the origins of Graham Flour.  Named after a Presbyterian minister who invented it in the 1800's, his belief was whole wheat was vital to health( not so different than now).  Instead of milling the wheat together he separated the Kernel from the Bran and Germ and milled all separately then recombined them to form Graham flour.  You can still buy it if you look around hard enough, Hogson Mills makes it and King Arthur Flour markets it as Pastry Flour but it's a rather expensive affectation for simple bread making.  I found a better substitute was to use King Arthur Flour's White Whole Wheat, the texture is very similar to Graham Flour.