Dyven (дивень, ring wedding bread)

The most important part of this bread is the place where there is no bread at all. Dyven is a ring, plaited threefold and baked golden, with a center wide enough for the bride to look through at her groom. The hole is not a trick of shaping. It is the future, framed in dough.

It belongs with korovai, the great Ukrainian wedding bread, but dyven is lighter on its feet: a braid, a circle, a promise you can carry. The dough is enriched with milk, eggs, butter, and honey, soft enough to tear tenderly but strong enough to hold its shape. My Aunt Nadia would have written, "braid it so it doesn't sulk," which is very funny until you see a loose plait flatten in the oven and understand exactly what she meant.

Here is the thing that decides it: make the center larger than looks sensible, and keep it open with an oiled metal ring or ovenproof ramekin while it bakes. Enriched dough swells inward as much as upward. If you are shy with the hole, you get a handsome loaf, yes, but not dyven.

Bake it for a table with noise around it. Wedding breads are not private breads. Even if your celebration is twelve people in a modern flat with shop flowers and somebody's phone charging beside the salt, the work is the same: flour on the cloth, egg glaze on your fingers, and a ring of bread that says the table is ready to witness something.