[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.

[15] The earliest citation for "raisin bread" in the Oxford English Dictionary is dated to an 1845 article in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.

[19] European versions of raisin bread include the Estonian "kringel"[20] and the Slovakian "vianočka"[21] and "stafidopsomo" in Greece.

[2] The United States Code of Federal Regulations specifies standards that raisin bread produced in the country must meet.

[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.