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

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 provides it a shiny sheen.

New Englanders have an extended custom of remodeling easy, thrifty components into cozy, hearty fare. Anadama bread, the basic New England loaf, is a superb instance of any such cooking. It makes use of pantry staples—on this case, flour, cornmeal, and molasses—in a inventive technique to make a hearty multi-purpose bread that’s nice as a desk bread or for sandwiches.

Rising up in Maine, I usually 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 basic 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 obtained its identify. 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 excellent 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 turned often called “Annadammer” or “Annadama.”

In actuality, New England bakers have been making breads incorporating cornmeal and molasses, corresponding to johnnycakes, because the Colonial period. However, in response to Jonathan Deutsch’s guide We Eat What? A Cultural Encyclopedia of Uncommon Meals in the US, in 1850 the identify “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 and marketing the bread to clients in 1876. My guess is that these apocryphal tales stemmed from advertising and marketing supplies making an attempt to show clients methods to pronounce the identify of the product. However, we’ll in all probability by no means know for certain.

Making a Nice Anadama Loaf

What we do know, nevertheless, is that this bread is (rattling) scrumptious. Staying true to no less than one of many tales, I begin by making a cornmeal porridge on the stovetop. Cooking the cornmeal this fashion hydrates and barely softens it, which helps hold the baked loaf from being dry and gritty. 1 / 4 cup of molasses stirred into the cornmeal provides a lightweight sweetness and caramel shade to the bread with out overpowering it. Progressively working the combination of flour, yeast, and salt into the porridge varieties 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 offers it a basic sandwich bread form whereas letting it rise till an inch above the pan ensures correct proofing for a fluffy, tender crumb. When you underproof it lower than this, it’s seemingly 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.