he was holding two pieces of bread in his hands

[constantinusphilo]

Is the following correct: he was holding two pieces of bread in his hands, a white in the left and a black in the right? Or should I say: a white piece in the left hand and a black one in the right hand?

 

[emsr2d2]

Is the following correct?

He was holding two pieces of bread in his hands, a white in the left and a black in the right.

Or should I say the following?

... a white piece in the left hand and a black one in the right hand.

Please note my corrections above, and that I have changed your thread title. Titles should be unique and relevant to the thread, and should include some/all of the words/phrases you are asking us about.

Your second ending is correct. Your first is not. It could be shortened to "He was holding two pieces of bread - white in his left hand and brown in his right".

Note that we don't say "black bread" (in the UK, at least). Bread is generally described as white, brown, wholemeal, and wholegrain.

 

[Skrej]

Note that we don't say "black bread" (in the UK, at least). Bread is generally described as white, brown, wholemeal, and wholegrain.

Really? Not even dark ryes and pumpernickel breads? They're not super common here in the US unfortunately, but black bread is definitely a thing in parts of the US.

The Volga Germans settled throughout much of my greater region along with various groups of ethnic Germans, so good black bread (although hard to find nowadays) was fairly common in my region in the form of either pumpernickel (German) or borodinsky (Russian). It doesn't seem to be as popular these days, which is too bad. It's some hearty stuff.

Many variants of the Russian black bread are actually a rye sourdough with molasses to feed the yeast, then seeded with either fennel or cumin - talk about a combination of strong flavors!

As such, I'm not bothered by the OP having white bread in one hand and black bread in the other.

 

[tedmc]

There is also charcoal bread, which is black.

 

[emsr2d2]

I am aware that there are black breads in the UK. What I meant was that the majority of BrE speakers differentiate between breads solely on the basis of whether they're white or brown. Pumpernickel and other rye breads clearly aren't white bread, so they tend to fall into the category of brown bread.
We sell plenty of rye bread and similar loaves at the vegetarian health food store I co-manage but no one (staff or customer) has ever referred to them as black bread.

 

[Skrej]

There is also charcoal bread, which is black.

Some of the international franchises of McDonald's in Japan also offer black buns colored with squid ink on a limited regional basis, too. For a few years Burger King offered a black bun here in the US around Halloween as a promotional gimmick. However, the side effect of the dye turning one's poo green resulted in a commercial failure once word spread.

Anyway, as Piscean mentioned, none of those are what we normally think of as black bread.

What we call 'black' is really just a dark brown in most cases. Some recipes do call for black cocoa, and of course a darker molasses will skew the color closer towards an actual black. Unless there are additives to purposely make it darker (squid ink, cocoa, charcoal (?!:shock, black molasses, etc.) it's really just a dark brown.

It's darker enough from something like whole wheat to merit a new descriptive category, and I suppose "really dark brown bread" wasn't catchy enough.

 

[stanislaw.masny]

Here in Poland, we call it: dark bread.

 

[Rover_KE]

Here in Poland, we call it[no colon] "dark bread".