Baking and pastry

The twenty-first entry is o pão duro, and it is worth stopping there, because English does this job with a word Portuguese simply does not have. « Stale » is one adjective covering a great deal of ground: stale bread, stale air in a shut room, stale news, a stale joke. What it names each time is the same abstraction, a loss of freshness, and it never says what that loss feels like. Portuguese has no such word and changes the adjective to suit the noun beside it. The loaf is duro, hard; the air in the room is viciado; the news is velha; the joke is gasta or batida. Where English reaches once, Portuguese reaches four times, and each time for a property a hand or an ear can check. There is a small bonus in it for a reader of this page. O pão duro names hardness, and the entry just above it, a retrogradação do amido, says where the hardness comes from: not chiefly from drying out, but from the starch setting again as it cools. The Portuguese name happens to describe precisely what the English one leaves out.