I’m reading Bulgakov’s Белая гвардия (The White Guard), which is frankly not a good novel — if it had been set in the famous “city of N” I probably would have given up after a hundred or so pages. But it’s set in a very vividly rendered Kiev in the winter of 1918-19, and I’m a sucker for city novels, so I persevered and now have only eighty pages to go, and my understanding of that complex metropolis is now far greater than it was. At any rate, I’ve just gotten to a passage of Hattic interest: after the city has changed hands yet again, three grim men bang on the door and announce a search, and the language of their wolfish leader is described as follows (Marian Schwartz’s translation):
He spoke a strange and incorrect language — a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian words — a language familiar to inhabitants of the City who had spent time in Podol, on the banks of the Dnieper, where in the summer the wharf’s winches whistled and spun and in the summer ragged men unloaded melons from barges.
Он говорил на странном и неправильном языке — смеси русских и украинских слов — языке, знакомом жителям Города, бывающим на Подоле, на берегу Днепра, где летом пристань свистит и вертит лебедками, где летом оборванные люди выгружают с барж арбузы…
That language is called surzhyk, “a range of mixed sociolects of Ukrainian and Russian languages used in certain regions of Ukraine and adjacent lands… The Ukrainian word surzhyk (from Proto-Slavic *sǫ — «with» + *rъžь — «rye») — originally referred to mix of different grains that includes rye or a product like flour or bread made from such a mix.” Melissa Mohr describes it at the Christian Science Monitor:
Research suggests that around 70% of Ukraine’s citizens speak Ukrainian as their native language, while 30% to 36% speak Russian at home. According to surveys that ask the question a little differently, over 80% speak neither Russian nor Ukrainian but Surzhyk, a combination of the two that has undergone substantial changes since Ukraine became an independent nation in 1991.
Surzhyk is Ukrainian for a mix of wheat and rye flour, which was cheaper and considered less desirable than pure wheat flour. By analogy the word came to refer to a mixture of the region’s languages, in which Russian was the wheat and Ukrainian the rye. Russian was the “prestige” language – the language of the ruling classes (Ukraine had become part of the Russian Empire in 1793); using it was a mark of education and sophistication. Ukrainian villagers saw that Russian had become a ticket to advancement but had little opportunity to learn the language. Instead, they mixed as many “elite” Russian words and pronunciations as they could into Ukrainian, and the first Surzhyk was born.
According to anthropologist Laada Bilaniuk, Surzhyk was scorned by pretty much everyone who didn’t speak it. The Ukrainian urban intelligentsia, who were secure enough in their status to resist the influence of Russian, looked down on it because it was a hybrid, “impure” language, and was spoken by rural people and peasants who migrated to the cities to find work. Ruling Russian speakers disdained both Ukrainian – “Little Russian,” as Czar Nicholas II called it – and the messy mishmash of Surzhyk.
When Ukraine became independent, Ukrainian became its new prestige language. Suddenly, university professors who had lectured in Russian were holding forth in Ukrainian; politicians who had campaigned in Russian were caught short when they had to address parliament in Ukrainian. Even Ukrainians who were not Russophone could have trouble with the new demand for Ukrainian. Many of those who had spoken Ukrainian at home were comfortable talking in social situations but had never learned the words to participate in political and philosophical discussion.
Today, Surzhyk has been adopted by Ukraine’s counterculture precisely because of its mongrel status. Rappers, for example, often rhyme in Surzhyk. They celebrate rather than hide its supposed grittiness and lack of pretension.
And back in 2008 mab (Michele Berdy) commented here about a variant, “reverse surzhyk”:
“The fifth category, Post-independence surzhyk, includes mixing brought about by the new state status of Ukrainian, with adults who are not used to speaking Ukrainian (especially in official contexts) trying to do so in the post-Soviet period. This entails Russian speakers trying to speak the Ukrainian they learned during their childhood in summer village visits or at school, or are just learning now. When lacking a Ukrainian term, these speakers borrow words from Russian and use Russian phonology, which adds to the perception of impurity. This surzhyk, which may be referred to as “reverse surzhyk” (Krouglov, 2003), emerges due to the aspirations of native Russian speakers to speak Ukrainian. However, it does not necessarily correspond to a Ukrainianized Russian base language, since the speakers in this category have often had some Ukrainian schooling. People whose profession used to be dominated by Russian, but whose work now requires public or written statements in Ukrainian, frequently produce such surzhyk. These practices fall on the Codeswitching through Language Mixing end of Auer’s continuum.”
There is a character in the novel who, fearing that nationalists are on the verge of taking over, starts studying a Ukrainian grammar and de-Russianizing his name; the amused Nikolka Turbin, one of the protagonists, asks him what the word for ‘cat’ is, and he says кит (should be кіт). Since кит is the Russian word for ‘whale,’ Nikolka slyly asks what the word for ‘whale’ is, and the poor fellow is at a loss (it’s actually кит, just like in Russian). Now, that’s what I call linguistic humor.
Very interesting post!
About this time last year, we were discussing trasianka.
The article quoted by mab in her comment is Laada Bilaniuk (2004) “A Typology of Surzhyk: Mixed Ukrainian-Russian Language”, International Journal of Bilingualism 8(4):409–425.
DOI: 10.1177/13670069040080040101
Bilaniuk’s article was interesting to read, too.
Thanks! Alas, the article is on Sage, not JSTOR, so I can’t access anything but the abstract.
I don’t know about that “where in the summer … and in the summer” in Schwartz’s translation. The Russian seems to have a lyrical repetition of где летом — either go the whole hog and reflect that faithfully with “where in the summer …, where in the summer …” or leave out the second summer completely.
I hadn’t noticed that, but I think I agree with you. I would almost certainly have translated it your way, but I am a known fanatic when it comes to reproducing the quirks of the original.
From a Telegram channel:
Минобороны РФ: украинские кіты отказываются быть котами
Минобороны РФ: в секретных биолабораториях Украины превращали котов в котів
They follow in the steps of Boris Zahoder.
[quote] Since кит is the Russian word for ‘whale,’ Nikolka slyly asks what the word for ‘whale’ is, and the poor fellow is at a loss (it’s actually кит, just like in Russian). Now, that’s what I call linguistic humor. [/quote]
Re “just like in Russian” – it’s spelled the same but pronounced differently, as can clearly be heard on the wiktionary page.
To Russian ear Ukrainian /и/ sounds like Russian /ы/ and Ukrainian /і/ sounds like Russian /и/
I tried three auto-translators on Zahoder’s poem (GT, DeepL, Apple). They are all a deep mess. The two words are translated as “kit” and “cat” in no obvious order, or as ‘whale’ and ‘cat’ (always in the wrong order), with “Keith” thrown in for laffs here and there.
So Hat, why does this novel fall so short of That Other novel of Bulgakov?
Y, an advice. Take seriously first 4 lines
В этой сказке
Нет порядка:
Что ни слово —
То загадка!
(In this tale
There is no order,
Every word
Is a riddle!)
And the sad conclusion, “Ну,//И навели порядок://В сказке больше нет загадок.//…//Все, как надо,//Все прилично//…” (“Well,//They put things into order//No more riddles in the tale//…//Everything as it should be//Everything is proper//…”)
I do indeed, except that I like Zahoder, who is so very human, and I don’t like the stubbornly stupid robots and their handlers.
Re “just like in Russian” – it’s spelled the same but pronounced differently, as can clearly be heard on the wiktionary page.
Yes, of course; I was talking about the spelling. I wasn’t about to go into the details of the pronunciation of the two languages, which would just drop an anvil on a nice little joke.
I’m speechless: if The White Guard is not a very good novel, there must be none such, not in the Russian language anyway. In my world, it’s The Novel, set as it is in The City.
Mohr seems to get the surzhyk part right but some of her facts are awkwardly communicated. “Ukraine had become part of the Russian Empire in 1793” is puzzling. Russia had annexed chunks of what’s now Ukraine much earlier than 1793 but only acquired Volhynia after the Third Partition of Poland in 1795-97 (and Halychyna, after 1939).
“Little Russian,” as Czar Nicholas II called it” is like “Calcutta, as Queen Victoria called Kolkata.”
Another interesting question is what happened to the language of the Ukrainians who had moved out before 1917, settling in Siberia and the Far East (the “Green Wedge”). Pick a Vladivostok newspaper: every other name sounds Ukrainian.
From the point of view of Ukrainian speakers in Galicia everyone else in Ukraine is speaking Surzhyk, or at least that was the attitude in the 1990s. It sounds like urban sophisticates in Kyiv have made an effort to purify their Ukrainian over the past few decades. Having Ukrainian taught in schools no doubt helps – I met some teenage refugees from Kharkiv a few months ago who spoke flawless Ukrainian, and without any self-consciousness. I met very few individuals who could or wanted to speak Ukrainian when I visited Kharkov a few decades ago.
I’m speechless: if The White Guard is not a very good novel, there must be none such, not in the Russian language anyway. In my world, it’s The Novel, set as it is in The City.
Well, obviously people value different qualities in novels. I can see if you’re primarily focused on the City, it would seem wonderful, and I do value that aspect. But in a novel I look for other things, and the sloppy construction of this one, starting out with Christmas 1918 and then jumping back and forth until the reader is terminally confused, devoting endless loving attention to the physical details of comfortable bourgeois life in that time and place (I know a lot of people love that, but I get bored quickly), presenting Talberg as an important character and then dropping him for hundreds of pages, dropping all the characters for long stretches and just describing stuff happening on the streets, starting out with a standard invisible narration and then after a couple of hundred pages suddenly writing “я вам доложу” [let me tell you] as if we’re in the hands of a chatty Gogol/Dostoevsky-type narrator… it all seems amateurish to me, which is not surprising, since it was his first novel.
Another interesting question is what happened to the language of the Ukrainians who had moved out before 1917, settling in Siberia and the Far East (the “Green Wedge”). Pick a Vladivostok newspaper: every other name sounds Ukrainian.
I suspect the answer is probablly not very interesting. They all switched to Russian and the education system and media in the intervening years have erased any of the Ukrainian inheritance that might have colored their Russian a few generations ago.
Basically, it seems to me he was so in love with his characters, their situation, and their city that he forgot about everything else. This is a common problem with autobiographical novels.
The symbolism of the name “surzhyk” is a bit tricky for an outsider because to an American (or, at least, to this American …) rye bread is definitely a marked/non-default/vaguely-“ethnic” alternative to wheat-flour bread, but is not particularly coded as “low-class” or “for poor people” etc. And of course “multi-grain” breads are now in vogue among heath-foodish types, for whom in my childhood “whole wheat” would have sufficed as the virtuous alternative to boring old white bread. (Yes yes I know there are lots of old proverbs in multiple languages premised on the notion that white bread is classier than brown, but I grew up in a culture where “whitebread” was a pejorative, meaning “conventional, bland and uninteresting.”)
But I take it there’s no East-Slavic proverbial resonance to a notion that flour (or bread or whatever) made from a mix of grains might be greater than the sum of its parts? I am struck by the facts that: (a) in the U.S. whiskey is almost always distilled from a mix of grains (in varying proportions, with the details making up the particular booze’s so called “mashbill”), most typically three, which is thought to yield better results than only using a single grain in the fermented mash; but (b) of the four most commonly-used grains, rye and wheat are the least likely to co-occur, i.e. corn/rye/barley* and corn/wheat/barley are both reasonably common combinations, but not e.g. rye/wheat/barley.
*If the corn proportion is >50% and other technicalities are observed, this is the most common mix for default bourbon; a bourbon with a mashbill that uses wheat instead of rye will typically be called a “wheated bourbon” or more informally a “wheater,” indicating that it’s the marked/non-default alternative.
Yeah, certainly in Russian culture white wheat bread is considered best and everything else is less desirable (though of course there’s also a nostalgic love for the dark bread one’s babushka served).
By the way, I just dug out my travel notes from my July-August 1971 trip to the Soviet Union and discovered that in Kiev we (the tour) stayed at the then-new Lybid Hotel (Готель «Либідь»). I remember very little of the visit, so it’s good to have the notes.
Vodka is not the booze for me, unless it’s infused with something interesting, but I see that at least a few brands of vodka currently produced in the Russian Federation (e.g. Zyr and Jewel of Russia) are distilled from a mix of wheat and rye, and I assume that for marketing purposes they have a spiel about why that’s actually better than a wheat-only starting point.
So when you lot say rye bread you mean some weak-sauce mix with wheat, and not the real 100% rye bread that makes little Viking boys into big Vikings? (Wheat bread, probably not so white back in the day, was definitely prestigious here).
There are also wheat-based “grain whisky”s made in Scotland. The one I tasted was not bad.
I am now reminded of the lovely bit of sociolinguistic/lexicographic fact that in the insider jargon spoken by the staff of American diners, “whiskey down” is still after many generations (and after many shifts in the typical ethnicity and/or immigrant background of staff) the standard phrase for “rye toast,” I think a more precise analysis would be that “Whiskey down!” is an instruction/command, meaning “put one order’s worth of rye bread in the toaster to be toasted.”
So when they are talking about a mix of rye and wheat, do they mean specifically white wheat flour? It seems odd to try to blend down white flour with rye; the rye would overwhelm it even in small quantities (just like the American so-called rye bread, with 10% rye enough to flavor it). And if they are talking about blending down whole wheat with rye (more plausible, since they both have strong flavors and are brown), why would whole wheat flour be so much more prestigious than rye?
Perhaps in pre-Bolshevik Russian culture, rye flour was the Ukrainian language; brown whole-wheat flour was the Russian language; and white (wheaten) flour was French?
So when they are talking about a mix of rye and wheat, do they mean specifically white wheat flour?
No, I’m sorry if I confused the issue by adding that bit.
I liked The White Guard when I read it, but do not remember much, not sure what it says about my attitude. In any event, I remember distinct young adult whiff (didn’t know what YA genre is in those days), which by itself is not a drawback, obviously.
There are also niche grains used in distillation, such as bere barley and spelt wheat.
Surzhyk – according to a Ukrainian dictionary – can refer to any mix of grains, such as wheat and rye, rye and barley, barley and oats, as well as to flour from such mix. Wheat stands above the other grains in the Eastern Slavic hierarchy: “[he] sowed wheat but reaped surzhik/surzhyk.”
I liked The White Guard when I read it, but do not remember much, not sure what it says about my attitude. In any event, I remember distinct young adult whiff (didn’t know what YA genre is in those days), which by itself is not a drawback, obviously.
Interesting — I hadn’t thought of it that way, but it makes sense (and makes it a parallel to, say, Kataev’s Белеет парус одинокий [A White Sail Gleams] (see this post). If I’d gone into it with that expectation, I wouldn’t have felt so let down!
Is balachka of the Kuban region a type of surzhik or is it a separate thing?
I don’t think it’s about the desirability of rye vs. wheat. If anything, Ukraine was always poetically described as wheat-land, while rye is exclusively a Northern, Russian staple. I am also sure that with respect to dialects, Surzhik refers not to a purposefully mixed flour but to naturally grown mix of grains. It is not intentionally mixed, it just grows that way by itself. Of course, many broader Surzhik dialects, those which are supposedly spoken by the vast majorities in the surveys, may be derided as unseemly recent mixes but probably grew organically for a very long time, with the whole South of Russia and East of Ukraine being full of historical transitional dialects. It’s like a hypothetical French speaker deriding Occitan or Catalan speech as “contaminated French”, perhaps?
“Impure” doesn’t have to mean “contaminated”, much less so “made up for a social advantage”…
Incidentally, no bread is more desirable for me than the almost impossible to get rye sourdough.
Thanks, it’s good to get a more detailed description.
Dmitry, I feel the same way as you about the bread. Once I learned to make my own it became a very easy routine, except for the advanced planning that sourdough baking requires.
OP:
I don’t buy into the sociolinguistics of this. Absent large-scale population movements, urban colloquials and working class sociolects are almost always based on the surrounding rural dialects. This sounds more like a three-way split: The old urban intelligentsia maintained the elevated and perhaps western-based sociolect from the Polish-Lithuanian days, The up-and-coming would switch to Russian (or local adaptations of Russian). Only the working class would speak and develop the locally based urban dialect with the usual code-switching to acrolect(s).
A generation or two later, russianisms that started as code-switching may be deeply integrated into the urban dialect, and even part of a carefully maintained distinction of urban and rural speech (violently policed in the schoolyard).
[Edit: Or what Dmitry said, actually knowing something about this.]
I didn’t mean to say that there is no contaminated / social aspiration-driven forms of Surzhik, especially of what they label “reverse Surzhik”, of these relatively recent forms partly driven by the government demands for the use of Ukrainian in the professional sphere. It’s just, those mixed forms also exist but that’s not what the 80% majority speaks.
Basically, lots of people in Ukraine have great passive command of Ukrainian but weaker active use. It’s because it was so customary to converse in two languages, with everyone speaking the language of one’s preference, but everyone understanding each other perfectly fine. This type of bilingualism is great for many purposes, but when someone attempts to speak the other language, three things are bound to happen: needless calqueing, false-friend word usage traps, and just plain mash-up of words. It’s the same story with every bilingual L1/L2 situation, of course. There is probably nothing terribly wrong with describing these mistakes as a kind of contamination, although I personally don’t see anything terribly wrong with these types of mistakes (OK the first one may be “less” wrong and the last, “most” wrong… but it’s just what a live language does in the bilingual setting). But of course when a nation faces an existential survival battle, then laissez faire descriptivism may not cut anymore. Then it may become legit to treat any L2 mistake or any dialectal subtlety as a looming cultural threat…
Yes, that’s all too true.
Speaking of babushkas serving bread: A standard episode in Russian (and also Ukrainian?) folktales in which a young, innocent woman has been taken in by Baba Yaga has the witch call for the girl to serve them dinner. When the girl goes to the cupboard, she finds only inferior foodstuffs, including water and black rye bread. Baba Yaga then demonstrates how it is supposed to be done, opening the same cupboard to find white wheat bread. Hearing these tales was the first exposure I had as a child to the Russian preference for wheat bread over rye.
Trond Engen, Absent large-scale population movements
But AFAIK there probably were large scale population movements. Industrial centers like Kharkiv, Kryvyi Rih, and Ekaterinoslav (currently Dnipro) drew people not only from local villages, but from Great Russia as well.
When the girl goes to the cupboard, she finds only inferior foodstuffs, including water and black rye bread
Never heard this version, so I asked around and checked Google books. Still nothing. Probably not a common version…
But there is a classic Geese-Swans fairly tail about a picky-eater spoiled girl, where a magic stove asks the girl to try some just-baked rye buns, but the girl naughtily refuses, telling the offended stove that she wouldn’t even eat fancy wheat pastries in her daddy’s place. The same girl also won’t drink milk, for she doesn’t even drink cream in her daddy’s place, etc. Not sure how to put this puzzle piece in place. Sure, white bread for the picky eaters. Equally sure, though, that white bread wasn’t a regular basic food in a Russian fairy-tale village, and that rye bread needed to be treated with due respect.
D.O.: But AFAIK there probably were large scale population movements. Industrial centers like Kharkiv, Kryvyi Rih, and Ekaterinoslav (currently Dnipro) drew people not only from local villages, but from Great Russia as well.
Sure (and I should have hedged more carefully). That’s how I’ve had the Ukrainian bilingualism explained before. What I reacted to was the sociolinguistics of the quoted paragraphs from the original post, where a home-grown working class (and even villagers) (mis-)adopt Russian because of clueless social aspiration. I don’t believe that and suggested another scenario.
“New” industrial cities are another matter. If the whole population is transplanted from somewhere else, so will their language be, and local dialects may hardly contribute more than a few words for local specialties. In such a case I’d expect the surrounding districts to be code-switching and eventually even succumb to the city dialect.
A saying from my youth (about bad old times, mind), “They never saw white bread” about desperately poor.
In Croatian fairy tales, wheat is called ‘pšenica bjelica’ ie. White wheat.
Though wheat itself is not white, flour is, as is the bread made from it. The peasantry seved it to guests and on special occasion. At ither times, it was rye, sorghum or corn ( maize), etc.
Maybe the white bread thing is a wider Slavic thing.
And a classic GULAG formula of pampered life: “Sugar – butter – white bread”
@Dmitry Pruss: I don’t remember the specific sources, but that kind of episode with Baba Yaga occurred in two separate stories that my father read to me. That repetition, and my father musing at the time about the apparently automatically assumed inferiority of rye bread, are why I remember it
@Brett, I repeated the searches in English, still nada. Maybe our diverse readers can give us a clue? The closest I got was in an English-language tale about Vassilisa, Baba Yaga’s new servant, who gets a heel of a black bread loaf for a meal (at which point I automatically start to muse about the assumed inferiority of the heel of a loaf in English lol)
By the way, I’ve finished the novel, and I can say I liked it better than I expected to after the first half. It got better as it went along, with a wonderful account of the older brother’s narrow escape from an armed detachment trying to kill him (he wondered why until he later realized he’d forgotten to remove the insignia from his hat).
And I’ve now started Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer, which I read half a century ago and which first introduced me to the city of Kiev (I still remember the scene where Yakov looks across the river at the high right bank); now that I know the city a lot better, it will be interesting to see how Malamud presents it.
I read White Guard almost seven years ago and thought pretty well of it. (No idea if that link will work.) I remember the references to War and Peace.
As to bread issue, my understanding is that around the start of the Elizabethan era, white bread (“manchet”) became the favorite of the moneyed classes, it being quite expensive compared to dark bread, so it’s been long a European status symbol.
Thanks, that’s an interesting take on the novel, and those bits you quoted were some of my favorites as well. I certainly took note of the references to War and Peace, since I’m currently rereading it with my wife, but I found them more irritating than otherwise, because I kept thinking “Son, you ain’t no Tolstoy.” I may simply not have been in the mood. As I say above, I found myself liking it more as I went along.
This kind of thing is portrayed a few times in Servant of the People. I’ll watch the next few episodes tomorrow.
Probably much longer than that. I’m used to Semmeln as Sunday breakfast food, and Weißbrot (ordinary loaf-shaped loaves of white bread, not baguettes or something) as a very rare phenomenon for some special occasions. Daily bread is Schwarzbrot, so named in contrast to Weißbrot rather than being at all black, and contains maybe 40% rye flour. The reason is of course that wheat has much less tolerance for cold; it won’t grow even fairly low in the mountains, not just the Alps but also the granite-based landscape south of Bohemia that is a lot like Norway in some ways. (“Nine months winter, three months cold.”) 100% Roggenbrot only became available a few years ago as far as I’ve noticed. (I like it a lot.)
Semmel is an ancient loan from an Early Western Romance version of Latin simila “wheat flour”. It might allow us to date West Germanic consonant stretching.
There are places where the local cognate of Getreide “cereal” had come to mean “rye” because that was the default cereal. I can’t remember where exactly, but as a page from the dtv Sprachatlas it’s probably online somewhere.
Ah, so that’s where we got ‘zemička’ from. 😀
“Rye bread” in Finland has been subject to the opposite drift: this used to imply basically 100% rye until circa early 90s (not that I was checking lists of ingredients closely at the time), but with trade and farming yields long improving and industrial baking on the rise, today probably most commercial brands include 10-30% wheat for a more glutinous, more easily handled dough; sometimes adding not even wheat flour but refined gluten. Wheat bread as a status symbol seems to have been shunted off into the (still wildly popular) adjacent genre of sweetbreads and -buns already about a century ago, as soon as also butter and sugar have grown well available. — Tumma leipä ‘dark bread’ is a concept also but quite often does not mark recipes with rye as much as with molasses.
A similar part of history that I hear strangely little about is the disappearence of barley breads… still common in Finland in some traditional flatbreads but hardly elsewhere. Doesn’t even have a symbolically attached Slavic nation to it, does it?
It’s interesting that only English and Egyptian Arabic have Wikipedia articles for barley bread.
Oh, the article is interesting in the context of present discussion.
(‘it is narrated that Jesus the son of Mary used to say, “O Bani Israil! You must drink pure water and the green things of the land and barley bread. Beware of wheat bread, for you will not be grateful enough for it.”‘ and everything actually )
I have a fondness for Swedish rye crackers (Wasa brand) but they’re hard to find. Rye Krisp is inferior.
One reason for less use of barley and rye might be the development of hybrid breeds more resistant to cold. North Dakota is cold enough for anyone and wheat is the state’s major product, and wheat is the main product farther north in Canada.
ND has hot sunny summers (“extreme continental climate”) and that may be the key variable. Cold winters and cool summers might be the problem. (North Dakota:: 30 below with a 30 mile wing, 90 above with 90% humidity. What’s not to like?).
https://wheatworld.org/wheat-101/wheat-production-map/
Rye came from the Middle East, same as wheat. If it can adapt to the far north, why shouldn’t wheat?
Wheat ultimately wins out over most similar grains due to its higher yield. Now that I think about, this might be related to its milder flavor than, say, rye. Among other things that increase the yield, wheat kernels are larger, which may mean that the intrinsic flavors get more spread out.
@Y
Farmers and experts like Lysenko tried to do this, without much success. I would guess that it is not amenable to normal cross-breeding techniques. Maybe try rice? Note also wheat can grow in northern latitudes with dry sunny summers and cold winters, but many (most?) places in N. Europe do not offer this combination.
Norway is about 70% self sufficient in grains — almost 100% for barley, oats and rye, and also wheat for animal fodder. The imported grains are almost entirely food quality wheat.
Grains can be cultivated commercially* north to the Trondheim region, but not along the western coast. It takes warm(ish), dry(ish) summers and marine sediments (clay).
* Within the current agricultural regime.
There are places where the local cognate of Getreide “cereal” had come to mean “rye” because that was the default cereal.
English corn is like this: in England it is wheat, in Scotland oats (at least through the 19C, per the DSL), in North America maize.
Why mix a mere two grains when making your bread, when the LORD recommended the mixing of six (okay maybe four grains and two legumes)? https://www.foodforlife.com/about_us/ezekiel-49 We appear to have a loaf of this currently in the house, which I suspect was purchased by one of my daughters rather than my wife (not me, man …) although I’m not 100% certain of that.
@J.W. Brewer: That Biblical recipe is for bread with which to punish oneself. It is supposed to be foul in taste and/or texture (contrasted with proper barley bread) and ritually unclean (baked in an oven heated by burning human waste). Somehow, I think that brand of bread sold today is not entirely authentic; it sounds like the FDA would object to parts the original recipe, for a start.
@JC: even beyond english! yiddish קאָרן / korn is rye.
i think a whole other part of the wheat/rye class contrast has to do with taxation and state structures. i’m trying to remember the details (from james scott, as usual), but it’s been a while since i absorbed them…
one piece:
domesticated wheat pretty much needs human help to exist, while rye isn’t really domesticated and does fine without people. and that makes rye a more flexible crop for cultivators looking to avoid taxation-by-confiscation (the core support of most pre- and early-modern states) – you can neglect it, hide your plots, wait till after the taxman comes to harvest it, and at worst it’ll re-seed itself. by contrast, wheat has to be harvested when it’s ready, or you won’t have seed for the next season – so it’s much harder to avoid the taxman if it’s your main crop.
there are other elements (that aren’t coming as quickly to mind) that make wheat (and elsewhere paddy rice) a preferred crop for states’ purposes of taxation and regimentation. rye isn’t in quite as stark a contrast to wheat as state-resistant tubers like potatos or cassava (easy to plant scattered; the crop isn’t readily visible; can be left in the ground for many months and harvested gradually), but it’s a step in their direction from wheat.
Man, I really have to read more James Scott.
yiddish קאָרן / korn is rye
corncrake is ‘ryecrake’ in both Finnish and Estonian:
ruisrääkkä
Finnish
Etymology
ruis (“rye”) + rääkkä (“crake”)
Noun
ruisrääkkä
1. corncrake, landrail (Crex crex)
rukkirääk
Estonian
Etymology
From rukis (“rye”) + rääk (“crake”)
Noun
rukkirääk
1. corncrake
Rye is frost resistant, unlike wheat. It might have been a useful trait in the Fertile Crescent too if the natural habitat was in the uplands. It might have been the early Neolithic cultures’ backup grain, collected when wheat failed due to the weather.
It also has a shorter growth cycle, which helps even more with the shorter Northern summers.
And unlike maize, it can productively absorb sunlight of the long Northern summer days (in contrast, maize shuts down photosynthesis for good after only so many hours of sunlight exposure, and needs a night to recharge)
And now I’m thinking that rye is better if you like to go viking once the fields are tilled and sown, and might not be back at exactly the right time to harvest that fickle wheat thing they like in the southlands.
When I lived in Southeast Kentucky we’d occasionally buy Ezekiel bread from our local Mennonite colony. It’s dense, chewy, and best toasted.
There used to be a 14-grain cereal and I can’t find it, but here’s a 10-grain.
https://www.bobsredmill.com/10-grain-hot-cereal.html
Steppe pasture is also good wheat for wheat, and besides being nomad invaders, the Scythians, exported wheat. Some Mongols also practiced grew grain, but they were the ones farthest from China. There were 2 reasons why certain areas were nomadic rather than agricultural. 1.) Unless an area was militarily secure, nomads would plunder the grain anyway, so why grow it? 2.) For the nomads themselves, there was comparative advantage to plundering China and extorting tribute from China instead of growing grain. Also, plundering and raiding are exciting, and growing grains is the very opposite of exciting.
Because the Bible alone doesn’t cut it these days, the page is stuffed with secular pseudoscience. Here’s the funniest part:
Uh, yes. That’s the point of chewing. You’re not going to swallow the grains whole anyway.
Also, how very American to brag about the natural sweetener in the bread, taking for granted that bread must be sweet!
@Rodger C. Our Ezekiel loaf is in the freezer and I witnessed my 17-year-old yesterday morning take two slices out and immediately pop them into the toaster.
@David M. I don’t know that I would call this a mainstream (much less typical and thus symbolic) product in the U.S. bread market, although you can find it sometimes in mainstream stores. With 330 million people, a weird niche product that 99% of the population would have no interest in can still support a thriving business. I will say that “multi-grain” is a phrase you see a lot these days to describe health-foodish baked goods, sort of displacing the role that “whole wheat” played in my younger years.
From The Kingdom of Rye: A brief history of Russian food by Darra Goldstein, published in May 2022: