Three Kaliningrad babushkas in a bread shop

And the moral of this story is?

31 March 2023 ~ Three Kaliningrad babushkas in a bread shop

On the subject of cakes and pastries, my wife popped into a bakery recently to avail herself of the delicacies there and whilst on the premises was witness to an altogether Russian experience, which reveals and underscores the generation gap.

Ahead of her in the shop were three babushkas who were each having difficulty deciding which loaves of bread to buy: plain white or dark and grainy.

The young man behind the counter, seeking to introduce some levity into the proceedings, cajoled his three stout customers with, “Come on ladies, whichever loaf you choose, I’ll throw in a strip show just for you.”

In the UK, no young man behind a bread shop counter, or anywhere else for that matter, would dare to put such temptation, however jocularly meant, in the way of ladies of a certain age for fear of being ravished.

My wife immediately responded to the young man’s offer with “That would be nice!” but the triumvirate was not amused. Far from incentivised, the ladies were clearly horrified. ‘If looks could kill!’ as the expression goes.

Nevertheless, the young man’s words did bring closure to the babushka’s indecisiveness, for grabbing the nearest loaves that they could lay their hands on, money quickly changed hands and with a mutual squaring of shoulders and unified snorting, they left the shop at a gallop.

Said the young shopkeeper to my wife, “Hmmm, that didn’t go down too well, did it!”

It was a pity, because he seemed to be a nice young man with a very fine line in understatement. Let’s hope that until he lands that job as a stripper, he will use his loaf more carefully!

Do you know?
Do you know that the Russian word for ‘bread’ is ‘khleb’? Of course you do. Ok, so do you know that the favourite type of bread in Russia is said to be rye rather than wheat? You know that, too. What you don’t know, however, is that Yeast karavai, a round loaf beautifully decorated with ears of corn and foliate motifs, features in the wedding ceremony. Before the reception commences, the newly weds take turns to bite into the loaf. The size of each bite is then compared, and the one who has been judged as having taken the largest bite is duly pronounced the dominant partner from then on in the marriage. How’s that for deciding equality! Neat, nice, no questions asked. When the time came to enact this ritual at our wedding, the bite I took was so prodigious that had my glass of champagne not been placed fortuitously close at hand I could have choked in the process. Hence the expression in matters of matrimony, more perhaps than in anything else, be careful not to ‘bite off more than you can chew’.