This recipe for traditional New England anandama bread—a slightly sweet dark yeast bread made with flour, cornmeal, and molasses—makes 2 loaves, one for eating now and one for freezing. Serve hot with butter and cinnamon.
Have you ever eaten anadama bread? It is a traditional New England dark yeast bread. Please welcome Hank Shaw as he shares the recipe for this delicious bread he baked for us the other day. ~ Elise
My mom was never a great baker, but she always told us about a bread she loved back home on the north coast of Massachusetts that was oddly called anadama bread.
Apparently the old story is that Anna was a fisherman’s wife who fed her boyfriend little more than corn porridge sweetened with molasses. One day, so the story goes, the fisherman came home, added some flour and yeast to the porridge and threw it in the oven to bake bread – all the while muttering, “Anna, damn it!”
Obviously this is an apocryphal story, but the bread – based on cornmeal and molasses – originated in Cape Ann, Massachusetts in the early part of the 20th century.
It’s a dense, dark bread, a little sweet from the molasses, and it goes very, very well with butter and cinnamon. Serve hot and 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 our recipe on the venerable one in Fanny Farmer’s cookbook, which is more than a century old.
More classic bread recipes
- Boston brown bread
- Homemade rye bread
- whole wheat bread
- oatmeal bread
- Irish soda bread
From the editors of Simply Recipes
Anadama bread
The dough is very sticky and not kneadable; just spoon it into the loaf pans. It will also take some time to rise properly – sometimes 3 to 4 hours. Just give it time, it will rise.
ingredients
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1/2 Cup meal with cereals
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2 cups water
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1/2 Cup molasses
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3 tablespoon butter (at room temperature)
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1 tablespoon kosher Salt
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1/2 Cup warm water
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1 (7g) package active dry yeast (2 1/4 teaspoons)
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4 1/2 cups bread flour
method
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Put cornmeal and boiling water in a bowl:
Place the cornmeal in a large bowl. Boil the 2 cups of water and pour the hot water into the cornmeal, stirring constantly to avoid lumps. Leave to rest for 30 minutes.
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Add the molasses, salt, and butter to the cornmeal mixture:
Add molasses, salt and butter and stir. The cornmeal water should still be warm enough to melt the butter at room temperature.
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Activate yeast:
In a small bowl, add 1/2 cup of warm water (slightly warmer than body temperature). Sprinkle the yeast over the water and let it sit for a few minutes. Then stir it to combine gently. Leave to rest for another 5 minutes.
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Combine the yeast and cornmeal mixtures, then add the flour:
Add the yeast and water to the bowl with the cornmeal and everything else and mix. Add the bread flour cup by cup, stirring after each addition. You’ll end up with something of a sticky mess.
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Fill the dough into loaf pans and let it rise:
Butter a couple of 5″ x 9″ loaf pans. Scoop the batter mixture into the pans as best you can; it will be sticky. Cover with a tea towel and let rise for several hours until doubled in size.
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Preheat the oven:
Preheat oven to 350°F.
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Bake:
Bake the loaves for 45 to 50 minutes or until a skewer or knife blade comes out clean. Let the loaves cool for a few minutes, then turn out onto wire racks to cool further.
| nutritional information (per serving) | |
|---|---|
| 163 | calories |
| 2g | Fat |
| 31g | carbohydrates |
| 4g | protein |
