Raisin bread

Raisin bread or fruit bread (also known as fruit toast or raisin toast in New Zealand and Australia)^[2] is a type of bread made with raisins and flavored with cinnamon. It is "usually a white flour or egg dough bread".^[3] Aside from white flour, raisin bread is also made with other flours, such as all-purpose flour, oat flour, or whole wheat flour. Some recipes include honey, brown sugar, eggs, or butter.^[4] Variations of the recipe include the addition of walnuts,^[5] hazelnuts,^[6] pecans^[7] or, for a dessert, rum or whisky.^[8][9]

Raisin bread

Raisin bread with cinnamon sugar swirled in the dough
Type	Sweet bread
Main ingredients	Grain, Raisins, Yeast[1]
Media: Raisin bread

Raisin bread is eaten in many different forms, including being served toasted for breakfast ("raisin toast") or made into sandwiches.^[10] Some restaurants serve raisin bread with their cheeseboards.^[11]

History

Its invention has been popularly incorrectly attributed to Henry David Thoreau^{[12][13][nb 1]} in Concord, Massachusetts lore, as there have been published recipes for bread with raisins since 1671.^[14] Since the 15th century, breads made with raisins were made in Europe. In Germany stollen was a Christmas bread. Kulich was an Easter bread made in Russia and panettone was made in Italy.^[15] The earliest citation for "raisin bread" in the Oxford English Dictionary is dated to an 1845 article in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.^[16] In England, raisin bread became a common element of high tea from the second half of the 19th century.^[17] In the 1920s, raisin bread was advertised as "The Bread Of Iron", due to the high iron content of the raisins.^[18] The bread became increasingly popular among English bakers in the 1960s.^[19]

Varieties

A loaf of raisin challa

European versions of raisin bread include the Estonian "kringel"^[20] and the Slovakian "vianočka"^[21] and "stafidopsomo" in Greece. A similar food is raisin challah, a traditional Jewish food for Shabbat and holidays.^[22] It has been suggested that Garibaldi biscuits were based on a raisin bread that was eaten by the troops of Italian general Giuseppe Garibaldi.^[23]

In Australia and New Zealand, buttered raisin toast is common for breakfast.^[2]

Production

The United States Code of Federal Regulations specifies standards that raisin bread produced in the country must meet. This includes a requirement for the weight of the raisins to be equal to 50% of the weight of flour used.^[24] Raisin bread is one of five types of bread for which federal standards have been outlined.^[25]

In cosmology

The ways in which individual raisins move during rising and baking of the bread is often used as an analogy to explain the expansion of the universe.^[26][27]

See also

• Food portal

• Barmbrack
• Cinnamon roll
• List of raisin dishes and foods
• Malt loaf
• Pain aux raisins
• Raisin cake
• Tea loaf

Notes

1. Walter Harding wrote in his biography of Henry Thoreau that the man had created raisin bread. Author Ken Jennings writes: "It seems the eminent Professor Harding was taken in by, of all things, a story in a 1943 Ladies' Home Journal article, which got its delicious, raisiny facts from a longstanding legend in Thoreau's hometown of Concord, Massachusetts... Ultimately Harding recanted his claims in a 1990 Thoreau Society Bulletin titled 'Thoreau and Raisin Bread.'"^[14]