The Hearty All-American Sandwich Bread I am Baking All Winter Lengthy

January 31, 2025

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Why It Works

Utilizing a cornmeal porridge as an alternative of dry cornmeal as the bottom of the dough retains the bread from having a sandy or gritty texture.
Brushing the baked loaf with butter when it is nonetheless heat softens the crust and offers it a shiny sheen.

New Englanders have a protracted custom of reworking easy, thrifty substances into cozy, hearty fare. Anadama bread, the traditional New England loaf, is a good instance of one of these cooking. It makes use of pantry staples—on this case, flour, cornmeal, and molasses—in a artistic solution to make a hearty multi-purpose bread that’s nice as a desk bread or for sandwiches.

Rising up in Maine, I typically loved anadama bread eating out with my household—it was a bread basket-staple at family-style eating places there. I’ve all the time cherished the candy taste and barely nubbly texture of anadama bread by itself, and it is even higher when toasted and slathered with salted butter, so I used to be excited to dig into the bread’s historical past and develop my very own recipe for a flavorful, satisfying model of this traditional bread.

Critical Eats / Debbie Wee

Origins of Anadama Bread

In researching the origins of the loaf, I got here throughout many tales of how this bread supposedly acquired its title. In a single model of the folklore, a fisherman residing on the North Shore of Massachusetts within the mid-1800s was served a supper of cornmeal mush by his spouse, Anna. Dissatisfied with being served this dinner one too many instances, the fisherman declared “Anna, rattling her!” and added flour, yeast, and molasses to the cornmeal combination to show it into bread as an alternative. In different tellings of the story, a New England sea captain had a spouse named Anna who was an incredible baker, and was well-known for her cornmeal and molasses bread. When she died, her husband put up a headstone in her honor studying, “Anna was a beautiful bride, however Anna, Rattling’er, up and died.” Thus, the bread grew to become often called “Annadammer” or “Annadama.”

In actuality, New England bakers have been making breads incorporating cornmeal and molasses, resembling johnnycakes, for the reason that Colonial period. However, in accordance with Jonathan Deutsch’s guide We Eat What? A Cultural Encyclopedia of Uncommon Meals in the USA, in 1850 the title “Anadama” for this model of bread was patented by a bakery in both Rockport or Gloucester, Massachusetts. An organization named Anadama Mixes, Inc. began advertising the bread to clients in 1876. My guess is that these apocryphal tales stemmed from advertising supplies making an attempt to show clients how one can pronounce the title of the product. However, we’ll most likely by no means know for positive.

Making a Nice Anadama Loaf

What we do know, nevertheless, is that this bread is (rattling) scrumptious. Staying true to a minimum of one of many tales, I begin by making a cornmeal porridge on the stovetop. Cooking the cornmeal this manner hydrates and barely softens it, which helps preserve the baked loaf from being dry and gritty. 1 / 4 cup of molasses stirred into the cornmeal provides a light-weight sweetness and caramel colour to the bread with out overpowering it. Regularly working the combination of flour, yeast, and salt into the porridge kinds a stiff dough which turns tender and pliable because it proves.

Critical Eats / Debbie Wee

Shaping the dough right into a easy cylinder earlier than tucking it tightly right into a loaf pan provides it a traditional sandwich bread form whereas letting it rise till an inch above the pan ensures correct proofing for a fluffy, tender crumb. Should you underproof it lower than this, it’s doubtless the loaf will prove dense and squat.

I end the bread by brushing the highest of the loaf with a little bit bit of additional butter for a stunning, shiny, tender crust that I simply know would make Anna (if she ever existed) proud.