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. 

Rye and Rum Pancakes? Breakfast Fit for A Pirate!

I'm taking a break this week from the usual witches, monsters and weirdness to ask a few questions:

1. Has your physician told you that you need to get more rum in your diet?

2. Have you ever wondered what a pirate might eat for breakfast?

3. Did you ever want to put vinegar on your pancakes?

If you answered yes to any of those questions I have a recipe you need to try.

I found it The Old Farmer's Almanac Colonial Cookbook, which was published by Yankee Magazine in 1976. This was given to me many years ago by my friend Dave, and it used to belong to his mother. The Colonial Cookbook contains lots of unusual recipes, like partridge in vine leaves, green corn pudding, and snow griddle cakes. It also has a recipe innocuously titled "rye pancakes."

In addition to rye flour, which you don't often see in pancake recipes, the recipe includes molasses and rum. It's very Olde New England (and also very piratey). I've never eaten pancakes with rum in the batter, so I thought I'd give the recipe a try.

Here's the recipe:

3 cups rye flour
1 cup flour
1 cup molasses
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cream of tartar
2 eggs
2 cups milk
1/2 cup New England rum

Combine ingredients, beat, fry!

A few things to note about this batter and these pancakes. First of all, the batter is very, very thick. The recipe warns that "These are very rich." That's an understatement. The batter is thick like a bread batter. I had to plop it into the pan, not pour it.

I also have to note that sadly most of the rum cooks away, leaving just a slight flavor but no real intoxication. The predominant flavor is molasses. Happily I love molasses!

Finally, these come out really brown. I realized while making these pancakes that a lot of New England cuisine is brown. Brown bread, Indian pudding, apple pie, roast turkey, New England pot roast, switchel, etc. It is the cuisine of a region where winter is long and summer is very, very short.

The Colonial Cookbook says the following about this recipe: "Here's a recipe that dates back to the early 1700s, when great fields of rye swayed in the wind all along the Taunton River in Massachusetts. The molasses or sugar required for these pancakes was brought up the river in smalls sloops or brigs... A cherished family tradition handed down from generation to generation." The Yankee Magazine web site says the recipe was submitted to them by a Miss Helen H. Lane.

I have no way of knowing if this recipe really dates to the 1700s, but the ingredients do make it seem possible. For example, the early New England settlers found that rye grew better than wheat in this cold climate, and it featured prominently in their baked goods, like brown bread. They always preferred wheat, though, and once New England became more prosperous they imported wheat from other states.

Rum and molasses also have deep roots in New England history. Yankee merchants would trade rum for slaves in Africa, and then trade the slaves for sugar and molasses in the Caribbean. They'd bring the molasses and sugar back to New England to make rum, which they'd then trade in Africa for slaves. They'd repeat this over and over, turning a profit with each transaction.

This exploitative economic system (known as the Triangle Trade) made the merchants quite wealthy, and also infused New England cuisine with Caribbean flavors. Molasses, rum, and spices like cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg are all essential to New England cooking, but all actually come from the Caribbean islands. It's strange to think that the so-called pumpkin pie spices, which are so homey and comforting, have their origin in such a dark period of history.

One last thing about these pancakes. Rather than topping them with butter and syrup, the Colonial Cookbook recommends topping them with vinegar and sugar. It says, "Fill a cereal bowl with sugar. Add enough vinegar to make the resulting mixture spreadable as butter. As you eat the pancakes, dab them with the mixture."

I thought this might be gross, but it was actually kind of delicious. The sour vinegar cut through the sweetness. The combination of vinegar and sugar is also an old New England one. It doesn't show up much these days, unless you are lucky enough to find someplace serving switchel.

Old New England Pie Crust: Tough Recipes for Tough People

My mother has always made the same Thanksgiving menu, consisting of turkey, squash, potatoes, turnip, stuffing and cranberry sauce. Appetizers might vary, but the main meal always remains the same. It's the same menu that her mother made as well.

Thanksgiving has its roots in the old New England Puritan feast days, and it's surprising how closely my mother's menu matches what people would have eaten three hundred years ago. I'm descended from relatively recent immigrants, but somehow this was the menu that my Quebecois grandmother learned to cook.

Dessert always consists of the same three pies: squash, mincemeat, and apple. Again, these are the pies that my grandmother always made. Why squash instead of pumpkin? I have no idea. Thank God that the One Pie company still makes canned squash. When they stop we might need to abandon the squash pie for pumpkin.

This year I'll be helping out my mother by baking the squash pie. She always makes her pie crust with flour, oil and water. It makes a very delicate crust, but is hard to roll out. I make my crust with shortening, flour, and butter, which is easier for me to handle.

 
I can hear you asking, "What does all this have to do with New England folklore?"

Pies as a form of food are very, very old. There are recipes for pie like dishes from ancient Rome and Egypt. In Medieval England, pies usually contained a mix of sweet and savory ingredients. Mix together some fish, some fowl, some game, some vegetables and some fruit and voila! A pie. Although the ingredients have changed over time, the basic concept has remained the same: food baked inside a pastry crust.

The pie crusts of old were generally not the tender, flaky delights that we experience today. Whether as butter, oil or shortening, fat is inexpensive to buy these days. In the past that was not the case, and many people made their pie crusts just out of flour and water. Fat adds tenderness to the pastry, so these fat-free crusts were quite tough.

The pie crusts in Colonial New England were really, really tough. Rye grows better in our climate than wheat, so rye flour was the most commonly used flour. Rye flour is much harder than wheat flour, so imagine making a fat-free rye flour pie crust. It was probably like edible ceramic.

You may think I exaggerate the toughness, but it was noted by several authors. In the 1500s this type of dough was called "strong dough." The English cookbook author Hannah Glasse included the following instructions in 1747's The Art of Cookery: "First make a good standing crust, let the Wall and Bottom be very thick..." If I'm not misinterpreting her, it sounds like the crust can stand up on it's own.

The Swedish minister Israel Acrelius wrote in 1759 that the crust "of a house pie, in country places ... is not broken even if a wagon wheel goes over it." Acrelius was writing about Delaware, and probably exaggerating a little, but you get the picture.

Strong pie crusts also figure into Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Oldtown Folks (1869), which is set in late 1700s Massachusetts. Two abandoned children find shelter for the night at the home of a friendly farmer. In the morning he sends them on their way with kindly words:

Sol added to these words a minced pie, with a rye crust of peculiarly solid texture, adapted to resist any of the incidents of time and travel, which had been set out as part of his last night's supper. 

The crust was so hard that it could be carried without a pan. Now that's a strong crust.


The hard crust does explain one thing that has always puzzled me. Housewives in pre-Industrial New England made dozens and dozens of pies in the weeks leading up Thanksgiving, and a cook prided herself on the number and variety of pies she could produce. Although some of these pies were eaten at Thanksgiving, the majority were stored in the root cellar for the winter. I always wondered if people had dozens and dozens of pie pans in their houses, but apparently they didn't. They probably just turned the pie out of its baking pan and stuck it on the shelf. The crust was so hard it would hold its shape for months.

In his 1877 book Being A Boy, Massachusetts-born writer Charles Dudley Warner talks about how a boy could steal pie from the root cellar by hiding it under his coat:

And yet this boy would have buttoned under his jacket an entire round pumpkin-pie. And the pie was so well made and so dry that it was not injured in the least, and it never hurt the boy's clothes a bit more than if it had been inside of him instead of outside; and this boy would retire to a secluded place and eat it with another boy, being never suspected because he was not in the cellar long enough to eat a pie, and he never appeared to have one about him.

Traditional New England menus are great, but let's praise innovation where we can. I don't think anyone wants to go back to eating rock solid pie crust, no matter how portable it is.

*****

If you want to learn more about traditional New England pies, I recommend James Baker's Thanksgiving: The Biography of An American Holiday and Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald's America's Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking. I got most of my information from those two books, which are great!

Moxie, Maine, and Moxie Flavored Cupcakes

Today I'm attending a birthday party for my friend Dave. I've known Dave for well over twenty years, and we both went to college in Maine. Dave also used to spend a lot of time in Maine when he was a kid and is a big fan of our northern neighbor.

To honor Dave, and the great state of Maine, I'm writing about Moxie this week. Moxie, to those of you who don't know, is a carbonated beverage (soda, tonic, cola, whatever!) that is associated with Maine and other parts of northern New England. When I was a kid you could really only find it up north, but now you can find it down here in southern New England as well.

Moxie is Maine's official state beverage, and was created in 1884 by Augustin Thompson, a Maine native who was a Civil War vet, a homeopath, and a surgeon. Although Moxie is now consumed as a soft drink, Thompson originally created it as a form of "nerve food" designed to strengthen the human nervous system. Thompson stated in his patent application that Moxie Nerve Food was "charged with soda for the cure of paralysis, softening of the brain, and mental imbecility."

Thompson began bottling Moxie in Lowell, Massachusetts, and he promoted it with a variety of clever schemes. For instance, he claimed that gentian root, Moxie's special flavoring ingredient, had been discovered in South America by someone named Lieutenant Moxie. After receiving a sample of the root from Lieutenant Moxie, Thompson found out it could cure insanity, blindness, headaches, and "loss of manhood from excesses." Moxie Nerve Food became a huge hit and soon Thompson was bottling 27,000 bottles each week. It went on to become popular across the country.

The story about Lieutenant Moxie was just created for marketing purposed. There never was anyone named Lieutenant Moxie. Historians aren't sure where Thompson got the name for his product, but they suspect he was inspired by one of Maine's geographic features that are named Moxie, like Moxie Mountain.

Now, about that gentian root. It doesn't really cure anything. It also tastes a little bitter, so when people first drink Moxie they're often like "That's pretty good.. wait, what the hell is that aftertaste?!" When I was a kid I don't think I was ever able to drink a full can. However, now that my palate has matured I appreciate it much more. The distinctive taste is what makes Moxie special, and why the word "moxie" is now used to mean spunk or energy.

During the Depression sales of Moxie declined, and they fell even farther during World War II. At its peak popularity Moxie was sold across the entire country, but slowly it became just a regional beverage found in Pennsylvania and New England. (We New Englanders always appreciate the finer things, like Moxie, Indian pudding, and chow mein sandwiches.) For much of the 20th century ownership of the brand shuffled between huge beverage corporations, all but ignored in a sea of sugary mergers and acquisitions, until Moxie finally found a home back in New England in 2007 at Coca Cola of New England in Bedford, New Hampshire. Apparently this happened none too soon - someone in Maine was so desperate that he had been making and selling Moxie out of his garage using gentian syrup he purchased from a previous bottling company.

As you can see, people in Maine are very attached to Moxie. In fact, there is annual Moxie festival in Lisbon Maine. If you attend you'll see lots of people wearing orange and black!

Moxie cupcakes, unfrosted.

You can just drink Moxie straight, or you can use it for mixed drinks. I was feeling adventurous and decided to bake with it. Here is my recipe for Moxie flavored cupcakes. I am not a cupcake expert, so I tweaked this root beer cupcake recipe from the Cupcake Project blog. (They are cupcake experts.) As a special bonus, these are vegan.

MOXIE CUPCAKE RECIPE

Ingredients:

1 cup Moxie
1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar
3/4 cup sugar
1/3 cup canola oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/3 cup flour
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
Frosting (I used cream cheese, but vanilla would work too.)

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Add vinegar to Moxie and let it sit. Line cupcake tin with liners. Sift together the flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt in a small bowl. 

3. Whisk the sugar, canola oil and vanilla into the Moxie/vinegar mixture until well combined.

4. Add the dry ingredients to the wet, and mix. Don't overmix, but you don't want any big lumps either.

5. Fill your cupcake liners about three quarters of the way full.

6. Bake for 18 - 22 minutes. I baked mine for 20 minutes and thirty seconds - they came out great!

7. Take cupcakes out of the pan to cool, otherwise they'll get soggy. Once they are fully cooled frost.

8. Eat!

I think these came out pretty good. They tasted a little bit like gingerbread and were very light and fluffy. I wish the Moxie flavor was stronger, but I didn't have any gentian root extract and used vanilla instead. Some health food stores do sell gentian root extract but I don't think it is intended for baking. It would probably taste pretty scary!

So, to sum up: even if you can't go to Maine this summer,  you can still drink some Moxie or make Moxie cupcakes and dream about visiting the sylvan wilds of Maine. And enjoy that aftertaste!

(I found the information about Moxie's history in Jim Baumer's 2011 book Moxie: Maine in a Bottle, which my colleague Heather loaned to me. Thanks Heather!)

Joe Froggers: A Cookie Fit for Pirates

Who made the first pumpkin pie?

Who made the first baked beans?

These are profound and unanswerable questions. The origins of many regional dishes are lost in the murky mists of the past. Even if I had a time machine I probably wouldn't find clear answers - most dishes have just evolved into their present form.

However, there are some recipes that do a have a clear point of origin like Tollhouse Cookies, Boston cream pie, and Joe Froggers.

Most people know the first two desserts but I don't think many people have eaten Joe Froggers, a molasses style cookie that originated in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

The origin story goes something like this. Joe Brown was an African-American resident of Marblehead in the 1700s. With his wife Lucretia (who was 22 years his junior), Joe ran a tavern on Gingerbread Hill. Gingerbread Hill sounds cozy and charming but like most taverns of the era, particularly in seaports, things were a little seedy at Joe's establishment. Gambling and heavy drinking were the norm, and as Marblehead historian Joseph Robinson wrote, "a more uncouth assemblage of ruffians could not be found anywhere." Locals with nicknames like Eagle Beak, Pie Mouth, and Cork Leg were among the regulars. Joe's tavern still stands in Marblehead.

However, Joe is famous not just for running a tavern that attracted the riffraff, but because of the cookie that bears his name: Joe Froggers. Joe's last name was not Frogger, but his tavern was located next to a frog pond. Another story says that the cookies got their name because when Lucretia poured the batter in her frying pan they formed a vaguely froglike shape. Perhaps the cookies should really be called Lucretia Froggers?

The Joe Froggers people make now are probably a little different than the original recipe. For one thing, in the 1700s they were the size of salad plates. That's a big cookie! Sailors and fishermen would buy them by the barrel for long sea voyages because they kept well. I like the idea of sailing around with a barrel full of cookies. Like Gingerbread Hill, it sounds charming but I'm sure the reality was something else entirely.

Besides their size and strange name, Joe Froggers are distinguished from other molasses cookies and gingersnaps by one key ingredient: rum. It's mixed right into the batter with the butter and sugar, and adds a nice bite to the cookie. It's only fitting for a cookie developed in a raucous seaside tavern. Dark rum is best. Luckily some our family gave us a bottle of Cruzan black strap rum at Christmas. It's probably the darkest rum out there. I felt like a pirate making these cookies!

I got the information about Joe Brown from this article in Marblehead Magazine. The actual cookies I made from a recipe in Yankee Magazine's Lost and Vintage Recipes, which is actually on sale at news stands right now. It has some interesting recipes beyond the Joe Froggers and is worth picking up.