Anadama Bread

Have you ever had Anadama bread? It’s a traditional dark yeast bread from New England. Please welcome Hank Shaw as he shares the recipe for this delicious loaf he made for us the other day. ~Elise

My mum was never much of a baker, but she used to tell us about a bread she loved back at home on the North Shore of Massachusetts called, oddly, anadama bread.

Apparently the old tale is that Anna was a fisherman’s wife who fed her beau little more than cornmeal porridge sweetened with molasses. One day, so the story goes, the fisherman came home, added some flour and yeast to the mush and tossed it in the oven to make bread – all the while muttering, “Anna, damn her!”

Obviously this is an apocryphal story, but the bread – based on cornmeal and molasses – dates back to Cape Ann, Massachusetts, in the early part of the 20th century.

It is a dense, dark bread, a little sweet from the molasses, and it is very, very good with butter and cinnamon. Serve it hot, and then later as toast.

Anadama bread also freezes well, which is why this recipe makes two loaves. We’ve read dozens of recipes for anadama bread and decided to base ours off the venerable one in the Fanny Farmer cookbook, which is more than a century old.

Anadama Bread Recipe

The dough is very sticky and is not kneadable; just spoon it into the loaf pans. It will also take some time to rise properly – sometimes 3-4 hours. Just give it time, it’ll rise.

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup cornmeal
• 2 cups water
• 1/2 cup molasses
• 3 Tbsp butter (at room temperature)
• 1 Tbsp salt
• 1/2 cup warm water
• 1 package dry yeast
• 4 1/2 cups bread flour

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