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