Village Butcher

In 1910, with the Republic freshly installed, Antonio Eduardo's great-grandfather was the owner of no less than 26 butchers, scattered throughout Ribatejo. He employed hundreds of people. But between inheritance and sharing the empire of the flesh, it broke. After more than a hundred years, there is only one butchery that resists in the family: the Aldeia, in Santo Estêvão. It is the property of this man, Antonio Eduardo, a man who grew up among carcasses to be dismantled and who even today, with an appreciable amount of butchers to work for himself, feels good with a cutlass in his hand to make steaks of a piece of aged calf beef or so traditional fighting bull of the region. He is also the one who walks by the cattle ranchers of the region, scout, choosing the animals that please him. More than the race, he is especially interested in fat. "If it has fat, I know the animal will be good," he says. And this is all true if the goal is aging the flesh, something that has already been practiced for several decades, yet the recent fashion of doing so was yet to come.