Russian Word of the Day

Another of the Russians' favorite fermented milk products is кефир kefir. You take milk, mix it with bacterial and yeast cultures, let it ferment for one or two or three days, and then bottle it. Usually it is made from cow's milk, but it's possible to use sheep or goat's milk as well. Compared to ряженка it is rather more acidic and slightly carbonated. The alcohol content in commercial kefir in Russia is usually less than 1%. It actually has live cultures in it, so it colonizes your gut with friendly flora that may have beneficial effects in human beings.

Most Americans' only exposure to cultured dairy products is to yogurt, usually flavored with sugar or fruit in the US, or sour cream as part of dips or dressings. So when Americans are first are exposed to kefir, they usually have a negative reaction. I didn't care for it at first, but now I really like it; and the American version that they sell in places like Whole Foods that is flavored with sugar and fruit... well, it's edible in a long-term toxic sort of way, but it's nothing like Russian kefir. Let's see some sample sentences:

Now what about the nutritional value of kefir? Here's the label.

Now that's interesting. In terms of its fat content it's about the same as ряженка.

The Russians drink a variety of fermented milk products and one of them is ряженка. You take milk, mix it with a bacterial culture, let it ferment for six to eight hours, then bring the process to a close. Essentially it is a type of yogurt without any flavor additives. Compared to кефир kefir, it's flavor is less acidic. We have no special word for this in English, so we usually just transliterate it as ryazhenka. It declines like this:

This last week I bought a packet of ряженка at the store. That's right: in Russia cold liquids are often sold in plastic packets. Here you can see it on the left. I drink about half a packet at a time, pouring it into a glass, which you can see on the left:

Now a thoughtful homemaker will wonder, “If it is in a floppy plastic bag, how the heck am I supposed to store an opened packet in the fridge?” Why, you stand the packet up in a mug, of course!

Let's see the word in some sentences:

Since I'm trying to limit my carb intake this summer, I of course am now wondering what the carb load is. Here's the ingredient lable. The words that appear first are in Tatar, since I am living in Kazan, and the words that follow are in Russian:

They mean:

Hm. Let's see. 100 mg of ryazhenka has 4.1 g of carbs. I'm limiting myself to 20 g of carbs a day. If a glass is 250 mg, then that's roughly 10 g of carbs for a glass of ryazhenka. Damn. That's half the day's carbs right there. Guess that means that leaves only meat and fat for the rest of the day. Actually, I can live with that.

¹ This was actually said by a Russian woman visiting the US. We had no kefir, no ryazhenka, no tvorog. It was like there was no human food there at all!

² Note to Russian readers: in the US when listing nutritional information, the word "calorie" means "kilocalorie". So for a nutritional discussion, "calorie" is a proper translation for ккал, even though in the metric system that is properly translated kilocalorie.

This morning I was reading about the Korean drink hwachae and realized “Hey, this is basically the same thing as компот!”

What is компот? It is a beverage made, essentially, by boiling fruit in water with some sugar and then letting the liquid cool down. You can make компот out of all sorts of fruit, fresh or dried. When you put a pitcher of it on the table, you leave the marvelous chunks of fruit in, not straining it out. The Grandma's Advice website lists the following versions:

It's a great summer drink of course, but the Russians will drink it in winter, too. Here are some sample sentences:

Сок is the Russian word for juice.

This week I bought myself a juicer. Not just any juicer, but the one from the infomercials- Jack LaLanne's Power Juicer Deluxe!

Я купилa соковыжималку высшего класса.
I bought a high quality juicer.

It was very exciting! Ok, I admit it, I love gadgets. But this one is going to change my life, I just know it. From now on, I will drink healthy. Just think of the vitamins!

Всё, с сегодняшнего дня я сажусь на соковою диету.*
That's it, I am going on an all-juice diet, starting today.

Now it was time to try out my wonderful, new, health-making juicer. So I made a vegetable juice and a fruit juice. Unfortunately, the veggie was a failed experiment. It just wasn't yummy. The fruit juice on the other hand, was a complete success!

Я сделала очень вкусный сок из яблок, апельсинов, и сливы.
I made a delicious juice out of apples, oranges, and plums.

Having completed my juicer tests, it was time to clean up. This meant taking the machine apart and doing my least favorite chore: washing dishes.

Hmmm, I think it's time to take a short break from the Juicer Deluxe. Maybe I'll change my life and get healthy next year.

За неделю все соки мне надоели.
Within a week, I was sick of all juices.

*As you may have noticed, when speaking of "going on a diet," Russians will say that they are "sitting on a diet." Almost as though they will sit down and not budge from said diet.

The word for juice is сок. Usually when we talk about juice, we specify the type of juice, thus we have phrases like:

In English the phrase “apple juice” is made up of two nouns where the first noun modifies the second noun. In Russian you don't normally use a first noun to modify a second noun. Instead you change the first noun into an adjective and then use it with the second word, thus:

Here are some sample sentences:

Many liquids sometimes appear in the genitive case to indicate ‘a quantity of,’ and juice is one of them. We call that usage the partitive genitive. Note the contrast in these sentences:

Сок is interesting because it has an alternative partitive genitive case form соку in addition to the regular genitive; sometimes we call those forms ‘second genitives.’ Thus you might come across:

Those second genitives are becoming less and less common. They are more conversational in style, less formal. You are very likely to hear them out of the mouth of someone's grandmother. A younger person with a big-city education will use them less often.