Raisin bread
Sweet bread made with raisins and cinnamon
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Raisin bread or fruit bread[2],which has been known as "bug bread"[3][4] is a type of bread made with raisins and flavored with cinnamon. It is "usually a white flour or egg dough bread".[5] 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.[6] Variations of the recipe include the addition of walnuts,[7] hazelnuts,[8] pecans[9] or, for a dessert, rum or whisky.[10][11]
Raisin bread is eaten in many different forms, including being served toasted for breakfast ("raisin toast") or made into sandwiches.[12] Some restaurants serve raisin bread with their cheeseboards.[13]
History
Its invention has been popularly incorrectly attributed to Henry David Thoreau[14][15][nb 1] in Concord, Massachusetts lore, as there have been published recipes for bread with raisins since 1671.[16] 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.[17] The earliest citation for "raisin bread" in the Oxford English Dictionary is dated to an 1845 article in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.[18] In England, raisin bread became a common element of high tea from the second half of the 19th century.[19] In the 1920s, raisin bread was advertised as "The Bread Of Iron", due to the high iron content of the raisins.[20] The bread became increasingly popular among English bakers in the 1960s.[21]
Varieties
European versions of raisin bread include the Estonian "kringel"[22] and the Slovakian "vianočka"[23] and "stafidopsomo" in Greece. A similar food is raisin challah, a traditional Jewish food for Shabbat and holidays.[24] It has been suggested that Garibaldi biscuits were based on a raisin bread that was eaten by the troops of Italian general Giuseppe Garibaldi.[25]
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.[26] Raisin bread is one of five types of bread for which federal standards have been outlined.[27]
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.[28][29]
See also
Notes
- 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.'"[16]
