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Food Groups

TagsCulture Food Vocabulary
UnitFood and Drinks
7 min read

Exploring food groups is a convenient way to help us learn European Portuguese food vocabulary in a more organized way.

Dairy Products

First, let’s look at some laticíniosdairy products :

Leite, iogurte, and queijo are a part of many Portuguese people’s breakfasts and snacks. Queijo, in particular, is very important and there are several tasty varieties. As for leite, there are 3 main types:

Fruits and Vegetables

Next, we’ll explore frutosfruits and legumesvegetables , or vegetaisvegetables .
Frutos is the proper, scientific term for plant structures that carry seeds, but you will probably hear frutafruit or frutasfruits more often in daily life. (Fruta is a collective noun, so either word can be used to refer to fruit as a category.) Frutos would, scientifically, include tomatoes, even though we often consider them to be vegetables. In Portugal, fruits can be added to salads or treated as sobremesasdesserts or snacks.
Comeste fruta hoje?Did you eat fruit today?
LegumesVegetables are included in most meals, as part of saladassalads or sopassoups . They include vegetables, cooked or raw, and also leafy greens, like alfaceslettuces and couvescabbages . Vegetaisvegetables is technically a broader term that might refer to plants in general, and for that reason, some people may not use it for vegetables. Other people might use legumes and vegetais interchangeably in the context of food, which is acceptable, as all legumes are indeed vegetais.
Let’s see some examples of fruits and vegetables:

Beans

We use leguminosasbeans, legumes to refer to all kinds of beans. (I guess because the word legumes was already taken for vegetables…) Beans are present in a wide variety of Portuguese dishes. Here are a few common examples:

Meat

When it comes to carnemeat , you can have:

Notice how carne de vacabeef translates to beef? In Portuguese, there isn’t a word for beef, so we use vacacow whether we’re talking about the cow or its meat. The same goes for porcopork , peruturkey , and frangochicken . The same words are used to refer to both the meat and the animal.
Now, be careful because the Portuguese word bifesteak looks and sounds very similar to beef, but it actually means “steak”. It is sometimes even used to refer to steaks made from the meat of other animals, as in “bife de porco”, not just the steaks made from cows.

Fish

Being a coastal nation, Portuguese cuisine is spectacularly rich in peixefish and mariscoseafood .
We don’t think of fish as having meat. We only use carnemeat and ossosbones when we refer to land animals. Instead, we call the meat of a fish peixefish , like the animal, and we call its bones espinhasbones, spines .
O bacalhauCod is the most popular fish in Portugal and can be found in hundreds of different dishes. Below, you can find some of the most common species of fish and seafood present in our cuisine:

Grains

Now, let’s see a list of different cereaiscereals, grains :

Os cereais are very much present in our daily lives. They are the basis for our everyday breakfast cereals, especially for kids. They are used to make farinhaflour , which is then used to make massapasta , or the very traditional broa de milhocorn bread , for example.
They’re also part of our second most favorite drink, as cevada is the main ingredient in cervejabeer .

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