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Anadama bread

Anadama bread noun: a traditional yeast bread of New England, made with wheat flour, cornmeal, molasses and sometimes rye flour.

Noun

Anadama bread (uncountable)

  1. A traditional yeast bread of New England, made with wheat flour, cornmeal, molasses and sometimes rye flour.
    • An amusing story of the origin of Anadama Bread relates—The name Anadama comes from a New England fisherman whose lazy wife always served him corn meal mush and molasses for dinner ... Tired of it, he mixed it with flour and yeast and baked it as bread, saying: "Anna damn her."1956, Betty Crocker, General Mills, Inc., Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book, page 109
    • As a compromise, I purchased cornmeal at the PX and made anadama bread.1984, Beatrice A. Ojakangas, Great Whole Grain Breads, page XII

Origin of Anadama bread

Unknown. Anadama bread has been an etymological puzzle for a long time. Dare cites Dialect Notes (1915), and states etymology unknown. John Mariani's Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink also states that the term dates in print from 1915. The often-given etymology, "Anna, damn her!", is certainly apocryphal.

Questions about Anadama bread

What does Anadama bread mean?
Anadama bread means a traditional yeast bread of New England, made with wheat flour, cornmeal, molasses and sometimes rye flour.
What part of speech is Anadama bread?
Anadama bread is a noun.

Words near Anadama bread in the dictionary

  1. anacyclamide
  2. anacyclamides
  3. anacyclic
  4. anacyclosis
  5. Anadama
  6. Anadama bread
  7. Anadarko
  8. anadem
  9. anadems
  10. anadenia
  11. ANADEW

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Anadama bread (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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