Barend van Zadelhoff Apr 23, 2013:

Brown bread

In Canada and the United Kingdom it simply refers to whole wheat bread.

This is called 'volkorenbrood' or 'bruin brood' in Dutch.
Can you claim that 'donker brood' in the question refers to 'volkorenbrood' or 'bruin brood'?
What's more likely is it refers to something else.
We have a word for this 'brown bread' from the UK (see above).

Since we don't know about the specifics 'dark bread' is the safest option.

As a native speaker of English (No English?) said here:

Could be almost any type of whole grain or rye bread so this would be the best description

I thought I should respond but let's leave it at this ... for now. :-)

Tony M Apr 23, 2013:

Google isn't the Bible Yes, but if you Google 'brown bread', you get almost 10 times that number of hits.

In any case, there are very many fortuitous collocations, where someone is simply talking about bread that happens to be 'dark'.

'black bread' is of course a familiar term in the UK — but I'd have to be very convinced that it is indeed what the chef had on her/his menu, otherwise choosing anything so specific risks over-translation.

Searching for Google images, one readily finds a number of images of clearly dark-coloured 'black' rye bread (which if that were what it was meant to be, I'd rather call by the more familiar term 'pumpernickel'); but the trouble is, there are also loads and loads of images that look just like ordinary 'brown bread' — irrespective, of course, of their actual cereal content; then again, you can of course get 'white' rye bread (my local village baker here makes a wonderful one!)

On the first 3 results pages, I counted 24 images that were clearly 'dark-couloured bread', 59 that seemed to be nothing to do with it at all, leaving approximately 87 (i.e. around 50%) that looked just like more or less ordinary 'brown bread'.

Barend van Zadelhoff Apr 23, 2013:

19,700 hits for 'dark bread' on site co.uk

http://www.google.nl/search?as_q=&as_epq=dark bread&as_oq=&a...