Cooking and recipes in Portuguese

The eighth entry is descascar, the plainest word on this page in Portuguese and one of the hardest to carry into English. It is built in the open: a casca is the outside of a thing, des- takes that outside away, and the verb then covers every case without a second thought. Descasque as batatas primeiro, and the same verb serves for descascar camarão, descascar uma laranja, descascar nozes, descascar ovos cozidos. English has to change word with the thing. A potato and an orange are peeled, a prawn and a nut and a boiled egg are shelled, maize is husked, a tomato is skinned — and none of those will stand in for another, because nobody peels a walnut. The noun underneath is split the same way, since a casca is the peel of a potato, the rind of a lemon, the shell of an egg, the husk of a grain and the bark of a tree, and English keeps five unrelated words for them. So what is worth carrying away is the shape of the problem rather than one translation: descascar asks what is being uncovered, and English answers with the name of the covering.