Anadama bread

Anadama bread is a traditional bread of New England made with white flour, cornmeal, molasses and sometimes rye flour.

Origin of name

There are several popular myths about the origin of the name, which mostly take this form:

"A fisherman, angry with his wife, Anna, for serving him nothing but cornmeal and molasses, one day adds flour and yeast to his porridge and eats the resultant bread, while cursing, "Anna, damn her." The neighbors baked it because it was so delicious and coined it Anadama or Anadamy.

Origin in Rockport, Massachusetts

It is also not readily agreed exactly when or where the bread originated, except that it exists before 1850 in Rockport, MA. It is thought it came from the local fishing community but it may have come through the Finnish Community of local stonecutters. During the turn of the century around 1900 it was baked by a man named Baker Knowlton on King Street in Rockport, MA and delivered in a horse-drawn cart to households in Rockport by men in blue smocks. In the 1940s a Rockport restaurant owned by Bill and Melissa Smith called The Blacksmith Shop on Mt. Pleasant St. started baking the bread for their restaurant in a small bakery on Main St. They baked about 80 loaves a day until 1956 when they built a modern $250,000 bakery on Pooles Lane. They had 70 employees and 40 trucks which delivered Anadama Bread all over New England.

The Anadama bread center of consumption was in Rockport and Gloucester, Massachusetts. Commercially available from local bakeries widely on Cape Ann in the early throughout the 1900s until 1970, when the Anadama Bread Bakery on Pooles Lane in Rockport, MA closed due to Bill Smith's death. For a number of years, it was baked by small local bakeries at breakfast places on Cape Ann.

References

• Beard Foundation
• The Legacy of Three Melissas By Melissa Smith Abbott granddaughter of Bill & Melissa Smith