Eating out

The fifteenth entry is a porção, glossed here as « the portion », and the gloss is right there and wrong twice over at the table. English keeps three nouns where Portuguese keeps one, each of them belonging to a different moment. « A portion » is what the kitchen decides before the plate leaves it — portion size, a generous portion, a children’s portion — and it is the word a menu reaches for, because it names what is sold. « A helping » is what arrives on one person’s plate at the table, and it implies that there is more in the dish: somebody takes a second helping, or asks for a small helping, and neither sentence will accept « portion ». « A serving » is a unit of measurement rather than food. It is printed on packets, per serving, and a recipe that serves four is counting people. So A porção de arroz dá para dois is a portion, what is spooned out at the table is a helping, and the figure on the side of the box is a serving. Portuguese lets the situation say which is meant; English makes the speaker decide first.