i kneadful things Marian Flaherty takes her love of bread to retail
Morning Sentinel
kneadful things Marian Flaherty takes her love of bread to retail
BY SCOTT MONROE
Staff Writer Kennebec Journal & Morning Sentinel 03/22/2009

WATERVILLE -- As soon as you step inside and close the front door, you feel at home. Then, it hits you like a cool breeze on a hot day.

The sweet smell of Anadama.

It is, after all, Monday morning at the Boothby Street home of Marian Flaherty. Her Anadama bread contains a rich combination of cornmeal, molasses and whole wheat.

The cornmeal, she says, "adds another flavor dimension" to the bread, for a sweeter taste.

Flaherty, 58, started selling her fresh breads out of her home in the last month. She lives with her husband, Bill, and has two children, Mack, 20, and Mary, 21.

For Flaherty, who is also legally blind, the new baking business is all about a love of bread.

And it's not just about eating the bread; Flaherty said she gets satisfaction out of kneading the bread dough and the entire baking process.

"I like doing it by hand, not some big mixing machine," Flaherty said. "I like the whole manual art aspect of it."

There's also a universality to bread, she said. Just as every culture has made baskets out of "whatever was around," so too have all of the world's people "taken some kind of grain, ground it up and added flour to it."

"That is really intriguing to me," she said.

Flaherty said she's been baking bread for more than 30 years, but she didn't grow up with the experience. It wasn't until the 1970s, when Flaherty was living in Mount Vernon, when she became interested in baking bread for the local farmers' market in the downtown.

"Back then, a lot of people were into the land, natural foods," Flaherty said. "After that (farmers' market) I started making bread for myself."

She started out baking whole wheat and oatmeal breads, but expanded her recipe range with a popular book published in 1970, "The Tassajara Bread Book," by Edward Espe Brown. She still keeps her original copy of the book in her kitchen.

Flaherty graduated from the University of Maine at Farmington with a degree in social services. She has worked in many professions throughout the years, including with the Head Start program, as a teacher's aide, as director of aquatics at The Y in Augusta and a substance-abuse counselor at MaineGeneral's Seton Unit in Waterville. The last six years she has worked as a licensed massage therapist and now she also works part time as a cook at Soup To Nuts in Waterville.

Flaherty's routine has been to bake three different breads a week, so she thought she might as well sell the breads, too. She has licensed her kitchen for retail baking to do that.

"It just sort of came to me one day, that it's something I like to do anyway," Flaherty said. "I thought they (the breads) would be appealing to other people."

Aside from Anadama on Mondays, there's whole wheat, whole wheat oatmeal and whole wheat millet on Wednesdays and filled breads on Fridays. The filled breads are made with a little less whole wheat but contain a swirl of nuts, dried fruits and spice -- raisin-cinnamon-walnut and apricot-pecan -- and are good eating at breakfast or afternoon tea, according to Flaherty.

Each loaf ranges in price from $4 to $5.

Not surprisingly, Flaherty loves to eat her baked goods. She will typically toast her bread and make sandwiches with the slices.

"I like to eat it. I think that all good cooks like to eat," Flaherty said. "I really like the whole wheat toasted with peanut butter. I'm not hungry all morning."

Flaherty buys 50-pound bags of flour, which last her about a month, from Uncle Dean's Good Groceries in Waterville. Baking takes about three hours from start to finish, she said.

Based on her baking experience, Flaherty said she is hoping to someday write her own book on bread and teach a class at her home.

Her goal, she said, is simply to share her love of bread with others. She is not interested in expanding her operation beyond her modest, residential kitchen.

"You're never going to have a large-scale bakery in a domestic kitchen and I don't think that's what I want anyway," Flaherty said.

Flaherty's breads can be ordered by calling her at home at 873-3141; the breads should be ordered the night before the scheduled baking day.

Scott Monroe -- 861-9253

smonroe@centralmaine.com

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