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So it was with a mixture of excitement, curiosity, and dread that I woke up on a cold, misty morning in Portugal and looked out the window of my room at orderly rows of leafless grapevines, the fires from distant hearths issuing smoke into a gray sky over the valley. Where I was staying was a bed-and-breakfast, a seventeenth-century quinta (a private home turned country inn) about half a mile from the Meirelles farm. It was set back from a twisting country road, past an arbor, surrounded by fields and orange groves and mountains, looking in every way as it must have four hundred years ago. Three young women looked after a few guests. There was a chapel, and a large dark country kitchen with a constantly burning wood fire and a long table. A vast carbon-blackened hooded chimney allowed most of the smoke to escape. The predominant smell in Portugal, I had quickly found, is wood smoke. The only source of heat in the large house – in my room, as well – was a burning fire. When I’d arrived late the previous night, there was one going in my room, creating a nice toasty zone, just large enough to undress and climb into the high four-poster bed. José’s family, in addition to their farm, have a home in nearby Amarante, and another residence in Oporto.

By the time I’d arrived here, I’d already gotten the picture that Portugal has plenty of good stuff to eat. I’d eaten head of pescada (a sort of oversized whiting), roast kid goat cooked in an old wood-burning oven, the doors sealed with plaster (they used to be sealed with cow dung), an incredible octopus risotto, and, of course, bacalhau, bacalhau, bacalhau (salted codfish). I’d spent a night in a roundhouse on a mountaintop in the Douro Valley, awakened in a torrential rainstorm to descend quickly (before the roads washed out) to a quinta at the bottom, where I had roast loin of pork, potatoes roasted in pork fat, and azeito cheese. I’d visited the open markets in Oporto, where I’d met fishwives whose skills with profanity would put any cook of my experience to shame. With José translating, I’d listened for a while to the back-and-forth between fishwives and customers, amazed that sixty-five-year-old ladies who looked like Martha Washington could make me blush.

On the day of the slaughter, we drove to the Meirelles farm, a stone and mortar farmhouse with upstairs living quarters, downstairs kitchen and dining area and adjacent larder. Across a dirt drive were animal pens, smokehouse, and a sizable barn. José’s father and cousin grow grapes, from which they make wine, and raise a few chickens, turkeys, geese, and pigs. A few hectares of grapevines and multiuse plots of land stretched over gracefully sloping fields beneath tree-covered hills and mountains, a few church spires and smoking chimneys just visible among leaves and branches.

It was early morning when I arrived, but there was already a large group assembled: José’s brother Francisco, his other brother, also Francisco (remember the wedding scene in Goodfellas, where everybody’s named Petey or Paul or Marie?), his mother, father, assorted other relatives, farmhands, women and children – most of whom were already occupied with the early preparations for two solid days of cooking and eating. Standing by the barn were three hired assassins, itinerant slaughterers/butchers, who apparently knock off from their day jobs from time to time to practice their much-called-upon skills with pig killing and pork butchering. They were a likable bunch: a red-cheeked old man in vest and shirtsleeves, sporting a black brim hat and dapper mustache, two younger men in sweaters and waterproof boots. Looking amiable and unthreatening, they shook my hand over early-morning glasses of vinho verde, a barely fermented white wine made from the family grapes.

Cousin Francisco positioned a sequence of bottle rockets and aerial bombs in the dirt outside the farmhouse and, one after the other, let them fly. The explosions rocked through the valley, announcing to all who could hear news of