Black Bread

Like black bread? Me, too.

Thinly sliced black bread with butter and caviar. Black bread with a piece of sheep's milk cheese and sprigs of green onion. Black bread spread with thick buckwheat honey.

I'm intrigued as to why English recipes for Russian black bread always include things like molasses, cocoa and espresso powder. While black bread goes WITH lots of things, not many things go IN it - the recipe for real Russian black bread is utter simplicity.

My personal favorite is a bread called Darnitsky. Called "gray bread" in Russian, the only ingredients in Darnitsky are whole rye flour, wheat flour, salt, water and yeast. When you cut it open it is gray and soft inside and has small, evenly spaced holes.

My next favorite is Borodinsky. This is a dark rye whose dry ingredients are limited to rye flour, whole wheat flour and rye malt. A small dollop of molasses is added with the salt and yeast, and each loaf is topped with aromatic coriander seeds. Borodinsky is a dense bread that makes excellent garlic croutons.

An important thing to understand about Russian food is that most of it is highly regulated by state standards called GOSTs. All bread labeled Borodinsky must contain 80% whole rye flour, 15% whole wheat flour and 5% malted rye. A Reinheitsgebot for bread, if you will.

You can put cocoa and grated lemon in your rye bread if you want, but the Russian government's official position is that such additives are nonsense. And most of the bread-eating public seems to agree. Expensive hearth-style breads with creative ingredients (and without the GOST stamp of approval) are starting to appear in upscale supermarkets, but the majority raises an eyebrow and buys traditional bread.

Bread lovers in Russia will tell you that where you buy your bread is just as important as the GOST stamp. The best bread comes from bread factory stores.

When I'm in Korolev, I go to Freshest Bread (in the photo), the store operated by the local bread factory, Kaliningradkhleb. According to the factory's official history, it was once part of a chain that belonged to the legendary Moscow baker Ivan Filippov. Nationalized and then privatized (or re-privatized?), the bakery is still there, and its bread is supremely good.

Good Food

Russian Cuisine in Exile, by Pyotr Vail and Alexandr Genis

I bought this book many years ago in a basement book store somewhere in Moscow, but it wasn't until quite recently that I was able to appreciate it. I think I had to go through years of trial and error in the kitchen followed by mother-in-law boot camp to be worthy of the wisdom Vail and Genis share in Russian Cuisine in Exile, namely: put the garlic in the soup after you've turned off the heat. You'll get more bite that way.

Gender and Language

Time for another reader question:

"I've always been curious about the cultural and psychological effects of an overtly "gendered" language, i.e., having to conjugate verbs and decline words specific to the speaker's or subject's gender. (In English, I could write a whole blog in the first person and nobody would know I was a woman, for example. In Russian, I'd have to "lie" with my grammar.) What do you make of this?

Good question. It seems very intuitive that gendered languages would reveal something about how people think about the objects or individuals they apply those grammatical genders to. However, gendered languages don't universally apply grammatical gender based on actual or even symbolic gender. Using Russian as an example, is there anything feminine about a digital camera or masculine about a suitcase? (I've always shied away from symbol-hunting, but I won't stop you if that's your thing.)

But could it work the other way around? What if - instead of us imposing our gender concepts on our languages - our languages are sneakily imposing a point of view on us? The official answer is no. Very few linguists today believe that people's feelings about actual gender are affected by their language's use of grammatical gender. English has practically no grammatical use for gender, while Russian, Spanish and lots of other languages do, but you wouldn't say that Russian and Spanish people are more strongly attached to or bound by their living, breathing, human genders than English speakers are, would you? What about the Finn who calls his son "it" and his daughter "it," as well? I know for a fact that lots of little Finnish girls like Disney princesses, so their language has not hobbled or empowered them. Yet.

And here's a few workarounds for writing a blog in Russian without revealing your gender:

1. Use the plural pronoun "we."

2. Use lots of passive constructions - It seemed to me instead of I thought (since the past tense of the verb would reveal your gender in Russian)

3. Switch maddeningly back and forth between genders

Love and the Translator

I got a question from a reader today asking if I knew anything about the Russian bride phenomenon. She wanted to know if it's true that lots of Russian women go to great trouble and expense to marry American men and if I'd ever encountered these brides in my translation business.

Honestly, it's much easier for me to talk about the second part of the question, so I'll start there.

I occasionally do phone interpreting for an immigration attorney who helps international fiancées prepare for visa interviews at the U.S. embassy. Most of the time I do written translations sitting alone at a computer, so it's always a stretch to do interpreting, which requires faster reactions and listening closely to a conversation over a poor connection. However, these conversations are fairly scripted and I've come to learn what to expect.

Sometimes this attorney refers me to men who would like me to interpret personal calls with their fiancées. This is harder, and I always review my interpreter code of conduct before making each call:

Rule 1. Interpret everything without editing. No matter what (and I do mean no matter what), the interpreter has to relay everything both parties say. These two folks are planning to get married, so communication is vital.

Rule 1a. Keep your kids out of the room while you're interpreting (see above). Learned this one the hard way.

Rule 2. Speak in the first person (don't use "he says/she says" constructions). The idea is to let the parties feel that they are speaking to each other instead of talking to the interpreter.

Rule 3. Introduce yourself to the fiancée before getting started. I like to make it clear that I work with the attorney and am in no way personally acquainted with the man. This is also an opportunity to explain Rules 1 and 2 so that everybody's on the same page.

Of the three, Rule 2 is definitely the hardest for me. I'm naturally a shy person and don't always like to mirror other people's tender emotions.

Now for the first part of the question: do lots of Russian women really put themselves out there on the internet to find American husbands? I suppose they do. Like all of us, I only know the people I know, so my insight is pretty limited. Now that the Russian economy has picked up considerably over the 1990s, my sense is that most "Russian" brides are actually from Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

But it's a fact that lots of younger Russian women complain about the male sense of entitlement and wonder if men in other countries might not be more fair and enlightened. Case in point: some women I know were recently cheering on Bozhena Rynska, a TV journalist who was so disgusted when a drunk photographer groped her at a gathering that she tasered him. He responded by punching her in the face. The police get to sort that one out.

Just imagine interpreting for Ms. Rynska as she interviews potential husband candidates - yikes!