Raisin bread is a type of bread made with raisins and flavored with cinnamon.

It is "usually a white flour or egg dough

bread".
[2]
Aside from white flour, raisin bread is also made with other flours, such as oat flour or whole wheat flour. Some recipes
include honey, brown sugar, eggs, or butter.
[3]
Variations of the recipe include the addition ofwalnuts,
[4]
hazelnuts,
[5]
pecans
[6]
or,
for a dessert, rum or whisky.
[7][8]

Raisin bread is eaten in many different forms, including being served toasted for breakfast ("raisin toast") or made into
sandwiches.
[9]
Some restaurants serve raisin bread with their cheeseboards.
[10]

Contents
[hide]
1 History
2 Varieties
3 Production
4 In cosmology
5 See also
6 Notes
7 References
8 Further reading
9 External links
History[edit]
Its invention has been attributed to Henry David Thoreau
[11][nb 1]
in Concord, Massachusetts lore, but there have been published
recipes for bread with raisins since 1671.
[12]
Since the 1400s, breads made with raisins were made in Europe. In
Germany stollenwas a Christmas bread. Kulich was an Easter bread made in Russia and panettone was made in Italy.
[13]
The
earliest citation for "raisin bread" in the Oxford English Dictionary is dated to an 1845 article in Blackwood's Edinburgh
Magazine.
[14]
In England, raisin bread became a common element of high tea from the second half of the nineteenth century.
[15]
In
the 1920s, raisin bread was advertised as "The Bread Of Iron", due to the high iron content of the raisins.
[16]
The bread became
increasingly popular among English bakers in the 1960s.
[17]

Varieties[edit]


A loaf of raisin challa
European versions of raisin bread include the Estonian "kringel"
[18]
and the Slovakian "vianocka".
[19]
A similar food is raisin challah,
a traditional Jewish food for Shabbat andholidays.
[20]
It has been suggested that Garibaldi biscuits were based on a raisin bread
that was eaten by the troops of Italian general Giuseppe Garibaldi.
[21]

Production[edit]
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.
[22]
Raisin bread is one of five
types of bread for which federal standards have been outlined.
[23]

In cosmology[edit]
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.
[24][25]