Anna and Her Damn Bread: A Legendary Recipe

This past weekend actually felt like winter, by which I mean it was cold and we got some snow. The recent 70 degree weekend was pleasant but a little freakish. Give me a cold snowy weekend instead! I know some of you out there hate snow but it always makes me happy to see it falling. It also makes me want to bake.

I'm still recovering from eating too many cookies and too much candy over Christmas, so I decided to bake some bread rather than a dessert. A wintry New England weekend calls for a classic New England recipe: anadama bread.

Anadama bread is a yeasted bread made with wheat flour, cornmeal, and molasses. Its consistency and taste is somewhere between cornbread and traditional sandwich bread. You can certainly use it to make sandwiches, but I think it's best just toasted and spread with butter. 

The cornmeal and molasses are dead giveaways that anadama bread originated in New England. These two ingredients feature in classic Yankee recipes like Indian pudding and brown bread and have deep roots in New England history. Corn (aka maize or Indian corn) has been part of the local diet for thousands of years. The Pilgrims stopped by Provincetown in 1620 on their way to Cape Cod and stole some corn that the local Wampanoags had stored there. That's how deeply rooted corn is in local history. 

Molasses also has deep roots in New England as part of what's known as the Triangular Trade. In the 1700s distilleries in New England produced rum from molasses, which merchants then traded in Africa for slaves. The slaves were transported to the Caribbean to work on sugar plantations which produced molasses. The molasses was then brought to New England to be distilled into rum which was traded in Africa for more slaves to make more molasses to make more rum... You get the picture and it's pretty grim. I tend to think of molasses as a quaint ingredient used in gingersnaps and molasses cookies but it does have an unhappy history. 

Back to the bread. There are two legends that explain anadama bread's unusual name, and they both center on a woman named Anna. In the first, Anna is the wife of a Cape Ann fisherman and she is a lousy cook. A really lousy cook. Every day she serves her husband the same exact thing for breakfast, lunch and dinner: cornmeal mush sweetened with molasses. Finally he can't take it anymore. He screams "Anna damn her!" and combines the cornmeal mush with flour and yeast to make bread. Thus we have anadama bread. 

In a second, less prevalent legend Anna is the wife of a sea-captain. This Anna is a great cook and provided baked goods for her husband's long ocean voyages that never spoiled or went bad. Still, the captain always referred to her as "Anna damn her" to his ship's crew, and her bread became known as "Anna damn her's bread." Thus we again have anadama bread. When Anna died the captain put the following on her tombstone: "Anna was a lovely bride, but Anna damn her, up and died." 

I don't know if either of these stories are true. They're pretty vague (what was Anna's surname and when did she live?) but the bread's unique name has no good historical explanation. None. Some people have suggested the recipe was created by Finnish fishermen or stonecutters living in Gloucester or Rockport, but I couldn't find anadama in the Finnish dictionary. The stories about Anna and her damned bread are the best explanations we have for the name.

Food historian Joyce White, on her blog A Taste of History, notes that "anadama bread" was filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 1850 as a brand of bread and was used in 1876 by a company called Anadma Mixes, Inc. The bread is definitely connected to Cape Ann. A man named Baker Knowlton produced the bread in Rockport by the end of the 19th century and shipping it across New England. 

Me and my bread! My expression's kind of odd...

If you have a hankering for anadama bread, rich in legend and history, you can probably buy some at the supermarket. When Pigs Fly, the bread company from York, Maine, sells a multi-grain version that is widely available. Anadama bread is not that hard to make, though, and you can find lots of recipes online (like this one from Yankee Magazine). Baking bread is great way to spend a cold, wintry day.

*****

My source for the two legends is Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, second edition (1988 ) by William, Mary and William Otis Morris. 

Roger Babson's Dogtown Boulders

I've been working this winter on a book about the legends and lore of Massachusetts's North Shore. The title? Legends and Lore of the North Shore, of course!

While I was researching the book Tony and I took a trip up to Dogtown Common, the Colonial-era ghost town on Cape Ann. Dogtown is famous for many things, including witches and maybe a werewolf, but one of its most visually interesting features are the boulders carved by Roger Babson during the Great Depression.

Stone walls delineate former farms in Dogtown Common.

Roger Babson was a very successful financier in the early part of the 20th century, and accurately forecast the Depression. Descended from some of Gloucester's earliest settlers, Babson was unhappy with how people thought about poor, abandoned Dogtown. Rather than focusing on the village's uncanny history and Yankee Gothic atmosphere, he felt people should instead celebrate the hard-working colonists who had founded Dogtown.

Boulders, boulders, boulders!

To rehabilitate its image, he proposed hiring a group of local masons to carve motivational slogans into some of the boulders that are scattered across the Dogtown plateau. And there are a lot of boulders there! The rocky, unproductive soil was one reason the settlers ultimately abandoned the place.

The Gloucester city leaders agreed to Babson's odd proposal. He was willing to pay the masons himself, and since it was the depths of the Depression the men needed the money. Babson also sweetened the deal by donating five hundred acres of land to Gloucester so the city could have a new reservoir.

In the end, the masons carved Roger Babson's slogans into thirty-six boulders across Dogtown Common. They also carved numbers to mark the cellar holes of the settlers' abandoned homes, and a boulder indicating the former village's main square.

Roger Babson died in the 1960s, but I think if he were alive today he might be disappointed at the effect his boulders have. Rather than diminishing Dogtown's creepy atmosphere, they actually increase it. The boulders might have been cornily motivational in the Depression when Dogtown was mostly meadow, but since that time it has become a dense forest.

The carved rocks actually make the forest seem more desolate, not less. They're just another abandoned human endeavor, like the ghost town itself. Whenever I stumbled upon one hidden among the trees, I wasn't motivated to work hard or save money. Instead, I was reminded that time and Mother Nature will ultimately overturn everything, whether it's a village founded by Puritans or boulders carved by an eccentric millionaire. Roger Babson did contribute to Dogtown's reputation, just not in the way he thought.

Mr. Foxwell and the Vanishing Dancers

Last week I posted a merman story from John Josselyn's 1674 book An Account of Two Voyages to New England.

Josselyn heard that story in Maine on June 26, 1639 when a group of his neighbors came over to welcome him to New England. After Mr. Mittin's story about the merman, another neighbor chimed in with his own strange tale:

The next story was told by Mr. Foxwell, now living in the province of Maine, who having been to the Eastward in a Shallop (a small sailboat) as far as Cape-Ann ... in his return was overtaken by the night, and fearing to land upon the barbarous shore, he put off a little further to Sea.

About midnight they were wakened with a loud voice from the shore, calling upon "Foxwell, Foxwell come a shore," two or three times. Upon the Sands they saw a great fire, and Men and Women hand in hand dancing round about it in a ring, after an hour or two they vanished. And as soon as the day appeared, Foxwell puts into a small Cove ... and traces along the shore, where he found the footing (footprints) of Men, Women and Children shod with shoes ; and an infinite number of brands-ends thrown up by the water, but neither Indian nor English could he meet with on the shore, nor in the woods.

These with many other stories they told me, the credit whereof I will neither impeach nor enforce, but shall satisfy my self, and I hope the Reader hereof, with the saying of a wife: "Learned and honorable Knight, that there are many stranger things in the world, than are to be seen between London and Stanes (a town on the Thames River)."

I read somewhere online that this may be the first ghost story written in the New World. I'm not sure if that's accurate, but I do like it quite a bit. Mr. Foxwell doesn't give any reason for what happened, and for me that obliqueness makes it creepier than you average ghost story.

Who were the dancers? If they were solid enough to leave footprints, how could they vanish? How did they know his name? And, the big question, what would have happened if he had joined them around their fire?

Mr Foxwell's tale reminds me of stories that kids still tell at night to spook each other, but it also really imparts to me how the early English settlers must have felt living at the edge of an unknown continent full of unexplained wonders and terrors.