TEMPURA typical Japanese dish consisting of giving a quick frying, about 3 minutes, to foods, such as vegetables and seafood, in sizes of a sufficiently small snack that can be ingested without cutting it. In Japanese it is TENPURA, a word that comes from the Latin tempura and this gave way to the Portuguese TEMPERO which means seasoning. The Iberian missionaries introduced her to the island with the intention of not eating meat at Easter.