6B) Food

Vocabulary

• meat: месо
• fruit: плод
• beef: говеждо
• soup: супа
• rice: ориз
• pasta: паста
• bread: хляб
• salt: сол (f)
• sugar: захар (f)
• chicken: пиле/пилешко
• lemon: лимон
• tomato: домат
• egg: яйце
• potato: картоф
• strawberry: ягода
• sandwich: сандвич
• banana: банан
• wine: вино
• tea: чай (m)
• onion: лук
• food: храна
• sauce: сос
• pork: свинско

Note: сол and захар are grammatical gender exceptions (feminine despite their endings).

Exceptions

Most of these words have regular plurals and definite forms. However, here are a couple of exceptions:

чай (tea) - The definite form is чаят when it is the subject of the sentence, and чая when it is the object. Most words ending in -й will use this -ят/я article. The plural is чаеве and the numeral plural чая.

яйце (egg) - plural: яйца, definite plural: яйцата.

Note that some of these words do not have a plural, they are uncountable: ориз (rice), паста (pasta), захар (sugar), сол (salt) and лук (onion).

Unlike in English, "плод" (fruit) is not uncountable in Bulgarian: "два плода" (two pieces of fruit).

Meat names

The words говеждо (beef) and свинско (pork) are in fact adjectives, used as a shorthand for говеждо месо and свинско месо (beef meat, pork meat).

Since it is obvious that we are talking about meat, the adjective is usually used alone, as a noun (a neuter one, since месо is neuter).

The word for chicken, пиле, really refers to the animal but it is very common to use it as the word for the meat. Similarly to говеждо and свинско, there is also an adjective, пилешко, that can be used to refer to chicken meat. Пиле and пилешко can be used mostly interchangeably, but the adjective can be used to refer to a particular cut: пилешко филе (chicken fillet).

To eat and to drink

The verbs to eat (ям) and to drink (пия) are part of the first conjugation group. Those are the verbs that end in -е in the 3rd person of the present tense. Their citation form usually ends in -а or -я. These 2 verbs are mostly regular. Here are their conjugations: