The Cascais Letter · Buyer notes

The Milk Is Not Fresh, and Other Things Americans Notice in a Portuguese Supermarket

Filed under: Living in Portugal

Every move to Portugal has a moment when it stops being paperwork and becomes real life. For the Americans I work with, it is rarely the visa appointment or the deed signing. It is the first proper food shop, standing in front of the milk in a Continente or a Pingo Doce, trolley half full, phone in hand, wondering why nothing is quite where it should be. Nothing in a Portuguese supermarket is worse than what you are used to. Almost all of it is slightly different, and the differences are worth learning early, because the weekly shop is where a move either settles or stays strange. Here are the ones every American notices, roughly in the order they notice them.

Start with the milk

The milk wall comes first. An American milk aisle is a cold wall of gallon jugs, every one of them fresh. A Portuguese one is mostly cartons standing at room temperature, and your first thought, that someone has forgotten to refrigerate them, is wrong. This is UHT milk, heated very briefly to a very high temperature and sealed inside the carton. Unopened, it keeps for months in a cupboard. Opened, it goes in the fridge and behaves like any other milk, and to most Portuguese tastes it simply is milk: the long life kind is the default for households and shops alike, and fresh milk is the exception you have to go looking for.

The words on the carton are the whole lesson. Gordo is whole milk. Meio gordo is semi skimmed, and it is the one most people reach for. Magro is skimmed. Sem lactose is lactose free. Nearly all of it comes in one litre cartons, a size that starts to make sense once your fridge is European and the shopping happens twice a week rather than as a single weekly expedition.

Fresh milk exists, in a small cold corner. Look for the words leite fresco, usually a short run of bottles in a chiller near the yoghurts. It is pasteurised, it tastes like the milk Americans grew up on, and its dates are counted in days rather than months, so buy the small bottle and drink it promptly. Some weeks, especially away from the big cities, the fresh corner is empty and the UHT wall is all there is. Nobody here finds that alarming, which tells you most of what you need to know.

The eggs sit on a shelf

Eggs are not refrigerated, and that is the system working as intended. In the European Union, eggs are not washed before they are sold. Washing strips off the cuticle, the thin natural coating that seals the shell, so European eggs keep theirs, and keep perfectly well at room temperature on an ordinary shelf, usually somewhere near the baking goods. American eggs are washed, which is exactly why American eggs have to live in the fridge. Neither system is careless. They are two opposite answers to the same question, and the Portuguese one means your eggs go in a cupboard, or in a bowl on the counter, rather than in the fridge door.

Then you crack one. The yolks are a deep, almost orange yellow that makes the yolks back home look pale, a matter of what the hens are fed. Cartons come in sixes and twelves, meia dúzia and uma dúzia, the shells are often brown, and the eggs are graded by size and by how the hens live. The ovos do campo, from hens that roam outdoors, are worth the small premium.

Weigh it yourself

Produce is priced by the kilo, and in the big supermarkets you do the weighing. Bag your tomatoes, take them to the scale standing in the produce section, set the bag on it, press the picture of the tomato, and stick the printed label on the bag. Arrive at the checkout with unweighed fruit and you will hear the phrase every newcomer hears exactly once, tem que pesar, you have to weigh them, and take the walk back to the scales while the queue watches. Lidl weighs at the till instead, which catches people out in the opposite direction.

At the market, hands off. In a municipal market the vendor picks, weighs and bags for you, and will usually choose better fruit than you would have chosen yourself. Loose produce here is also genuinely loose: no plastic clamshell holding six apples, no shrink wrapped pair of courgettes. You buy three peaches, one melon, two onions, exactly what the recipe wants.

Take a number

The fish, meat and cheese counters run on a paper ticket. Tear a senha from the little red dispenser, watch the board, and when your number comes up, order. Cheese and cold meats are cut and weighed in front of you: duzentas gramas, 200 grams, of queijo da Serra sliced off the wheel, fiambre, the everyday cooked ham, cut thick or thin as you ask. Nothing arrives in a sealed plastic tray unless you walk to the pre packed shelf and choose it yourself.

It slows the shop down by American standards and improves it by Portuguese ones. The person behind the counter will tell you which cheese is eating well this week, and they are not selling you anything. They are just telling you.

Bacalhau comes with homework

The salt cod wall is the deep end. Every supermarket has one: stiff, pale slabs of bacalhau stacked like boards, smelling faintly of the sea and strongly of salt. This is cod preserved the old way, salted and dried, and it is not ready to cook. It needs demolhar, a soak in cold water in the fridge for a day or two depending on the thickness of the cut, with the water changed every six hours or so and the skin side facing up. Plan a bacalhau dinner and you plan it two days out, or you cheat respectably and buy bacalhau demolhado, pre soaked and frozen, which is what plenty of Portuguese households do.

People here say there are as many ways to cook bacalhau as there are days in the year, and the fish counter around it runs at a different scale from an American one: whole sea bass and sea bream on ice, sardines in their summer season, octopus, prawns sold by the kilo, and a fishmonger who will clean and cut whatever you point at, the way you ask.

And tinned fish is not a compromise. Conservas, sardines, tuna, mackerel and octopus in olive oil, are a delicacy here, packed in tins beautiful enough to give as presents and priced accordingly. Whole shops are devoted to them: the Conserveira de Lisboa in the Baixa has sold little else for generations. The American assumption that fish from a can is the cheap option does not survive its first gift tin.

Coffee means espresso

Um café is an espresso. Order a coffee anywhere in Portugal and a small, strong espresso is what arrives, drunk standing at the counter in about a minute. In Lisbon it is also called a bica, in Porto a cimbalino. There is no pot of drip coffee anywhere in this story, and no free refill culture behind it.

The milky end of the menu has its own vocabulary. A meia de leite is half coffee and half steamed milk in a cup, the closest everyday order to a small latte. A galão is a tall glass filled mostly with steamed milk and topped with coffee, gentler still. And the prices will spoil you for home: an espresso at a neighbourhood counter runs from about sixty cents to just over a euro, a galão a little more, which is why the café stop is a daily habit here rather than a treat.

Cream, butter and the baking translations

Cream is where American recipes go to be translated. Natas para bater, at about 35 percent fat, is the only cream that whips, and it is your heavy cream. Natas para culinária is a lighter cooking cream, around 18 percent fat, with thickeners in it so it survives sauces without splitting, and no amount of whisking will ever whip it. There is no half and half at all. The Portuguese answer is to stir milk into cream until it looks right. Butter is simpler: com sal or sem sal, salted or not, with butter from the Azores the name to look for. It comes in 250 gram blocks rather than sticks, which turns American tablespoon markings into a small act of mental arithmetic.

Baking needs three more translations. Farinha com fermento is self raising flour, sem fermento is plain. Fermento em pó is baking powder. And every oven dial is in Celsius, so American recipes need converting before they need anything else: 180 degrees is the number you will use most often, where your recipes say 350.

The genuinely hard to find list is shorter than it was. Peanut butter is the classic example. Five years ago it was an import shop expedition, and now Continente and Lidl sell their own, decent and a little less sweet than the American jars. Jif and Skippy remain import shop items, alongside ranch dressing, root beer and canned pumpkin for Thanksgiving, €4.25 a tin at Glood the week I checked, which concentrates the mind wonderfully when you are measuring pie filling. Glood, the international grocer with shops in Lisbon, Estoril and Cascais, is where the American shelf lives. Maple syrup turns up at Auchan and in the import shops rather than everywhere, and the health food chain Celeiro fills most of the remaining gaps, from gluten free flour to proper supplements.

The small rituals

The trolley wants a coin. A one euro coin, or a token the same size, unlocks it from the row, and you get it back when you chain the trolley up again. Bags are yours to bring: shops charge a few cents for theirs, and most households keep a set by the door and another set in the car.

Markets keep morning hours. A municipal market is a morning institution. In Cascais, the produce market at the Mercado da Vila runs on Wednesday and Saturday mornings, the fish and butcher stalls trade until two in the afternoon and rest on Mondays, and by mid afternoon the hall belongs to its cafés and restaurants. Lisbon's Mercado da Ribeira tells the same story, fish and produce from six in the morning until two. The big supermarkets keep the opposite hours, open seven days a week, Sundays included, often until nine at night or later.

And the day runs later. Lunch is at one or two, the restaurants empty out in the middle of the afternoon, and dinner is at eight or nine, in kitchens that barely stir before half past seven. In your first month you will eat too early, in a room full of other new arrivals, and be home before the Portuguese sit down. It passes.

The good surprises, saved for last

The olive oil aisle is a wine aisle. Azeite gets the serious treatment: single estates, named regions, the new season's oil, at prices that would look like a misprint in an American store. Bread is bought daily, often twice a day, from the padaria, and can still be warm at lunch. A kilo of market tomatoes in season costs less than the parking at an American farmers market, and tastes the way Americans keep insisting tomatoes used to taste.

Lunch is the other surprise. The prato do dia, the dish of the day at a neighbourhood tasca, is a full plate of real cooking, often with soup to start it and a coffee to finish, for somewhere between eight and twelve euros. And the supermarket wine shelves sell good Portuguese reds for the price of a coffee back home, which recalibrates the weekly shop in a way nobody complains about.

The milk is the story every American tells first, usually inside the first week, usually laughing. Six months in, it stops being a story at all. The UHT carton is in the cupboard, the eggs are on the counter where they belong, you weigh your own tomatoes without thinking, and the first bewildering shop has quietly become the errand you would not swap back. That, in my experience, is also roughly when a house here starts to feel like a home. If you are at the stage of choosing the house itself, start with the brief below, and we can talk about the shops after.

Sources

Checked in October 2026. Prices, ranges and market hours move, and every town keeps its own market days: the Cascais hours above are the example outside my door, not a national rule.
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