The butelo, a sausage from the northern mountains of Galicia, a relative of the Bercian botillo, surely more popular, is in good health. Currently, there are several companies that are dedicated to its production in the area. However, the tradition of its homemade preparation, essential in another era for the daily diet of families, is disappearing and perhaps Tita Fernández Blanco is its last representative.
We are talking about an ancestral production whose origins, which are lost in time, some authors place in the Middle Ages. Stuffed pork, usually rib which, depending on the area, is accompanied by other cuts and bones, the appropriate tripe and a multitude of variants. The butelo belongs to a large family of embuchados that appear from the western mountains of Asturias to the northern limit of Extremadura with preparations such as botillos, botelos, butiellos, butiechos, bandusos, buches de ribs, perhaps even even choscos and morcones, which demonstrate the This type of clothing was widespread throughout the western peninsula, on both sides of the border.
Here, in the area of the Rodil River and the mountains of A Fonsagrada, in front of the Serra do Invernal, in one of the few classified high mountain areas in the north of Galicia, the tripe, normally the cecum or a pig's stomach, It is stuffed with ribs and skins of the same animal, previously marinated, smoked and cured until the butelo is ready to cook. In other places the incorporation of tongues, tails, fat, back bones or heads is accepted, but not here. That's how, at least, Tita learned it from her family. And so he continues to make it.
Modesta Fernández, Tita de Vilarello for those who know her, grew up with her uncles in the house where she still lives today. Her husband, Pepe, is from Barbeitos, a town a little further up, towards Asturias. He was a carrier all his life; She had a multitude of jobs and for years she was a cook, first in her restaurant, in A Fonsagrada, and later in a prestigious establishment in A Coruña before returning to the town.
At some point he realized that the tradition of making butelos at home, as it had always been done, was being lost. Older people stopped making them and young people did not learn the secrets of their preparation. So he contacted the city council to promote the creation of a Butelo Festival, which would give a little visibility to this product and which a few weeks ago celebrated its twenty-seventh edition.
In that first call, according to the press of the time, only three producers participated, with a few dozen butelos. In 2024, it is estimated that more than 10,000 kg of this and other traditional sausages from the area will be sold. However, while the love for the product remains, home-made production has not stopped declining during this time.
This year, the artisan received the Butelo de Oro, the highest award given by the city council, for her work as a pioneer. She received us at her house days after her. I went with the cook Lucía Freitas, immersed in her work in the Amas da Terra project, to put her in contact with a Tita whom, by chance of fate, I met more than a decade ago. Nothing has changed since then either in the character of this couple, always welcoming, or in Tita's defense of butelo and her tradition.
“This is going to last until I get tired,” he says as we sit around his wood-burning stove. Her husband has long retired, her children have become independent and they are, for a good part of the year, the last two inhabitants of a village that, like so many others in inland Galicia, has lost its population over time. .
“Before we sometimes killed six pigs. Now two, at most three,” she continues. Homemade butelo preparation is a long and laborious process that results in a necessarily expensive product. This, together with the legal requirements for its trade, means that for those who dedicate themselves to it on a domestic scale and as a strictly seasonal product, the professional activity ceases to make sense.
With that, many things are lost. Tita lives in a house that they built next to the old family building where she still has her workshop and a second kitchen. Upon entering, one is impressed by the thick slate walls that, as she explains when I ask her, have been the same since at least 1700. At the back, in the fumeiro, the old smokehouse, soot has accumulated on the walls for centuries. You can dip your finger in it as a measure of time and the thousands of sausages that were cured here.
Above the place where the fire is lit there is an attic where the sausages to be smoked are hung. And in the background, in the same room, a stone oven that Tita still lights every few weeks. “We continue making our bread and our empanadas. When I turn it on, I bake about 15 kilos of bread. When we run out, we turn it back on, but now, since it's just us, it takes longer between batches."
The house is surrounded by a chestnut forest. Pepe shows me the spring, next to the entrance, from which they draw water. The silence is absolute. You can't hear a car in the distance. Only, very occasionally, a brushcutter or a chainsaw in the distance, flooding the valley with its sound from the other side.
It's cold outside. The weather in these mountains is harsh in February, even when the day is fine, so Tita has turned on the kitchen in the old building. We sit there, in the heat, and Pepe pours us more wine and offers us ham. His pigs, raised right here, prepared and cured just a few meters from where we sit. Just as it was always done. They have cooked some chickpeas and some potatoes. And next to them, a couple of types of chorizos that she makes for her family, and a butelo. One of the last of the season. “And next year we'll see if I do it again,” she says. I know he doesn't mean it, but just thinking that one day it will be true is shocking to me.
We talk about traditional sweets that almost no one makes anymore, about the cantelo bagels, about those that are cooked for Easter or about how the authentic A Fonsagrada cake is prepared, a rarity within the Galician recipe book; of the empanadas and recipes that he remembers from times past, but also of the slaughter of the pig or the flour used to prepare the bread. Listening to it is a treasure.
The butelo market is assured. Butcher shops and small industries in the region ensure its continuity. The future of home brewing is, unfortunately, something else. Perhaps we are witnessing his last days. When Tita decides that she is no longer making any more, a centuries-old tradition in that valley, in that town, in that house, will have ceased to exist; knowledge passed down from generation to generation, vocabulary, processes and rituals will be lost. With them will also disappear a domestic tradition that, yes, it is true, has been modernized, has adapted to the rules of the contemporary market and has made the leap to industry, but will cease to exist, in its ancestral version, forever.
Tita is, like many other women, each in a different field of food crafts, the guardian of a legacy; the custody of knowledge, of a way of living, of socializing around food and relating to the environment that is gradually fading before our eyes.
I am convinced that we have the task of documenting that work and preserving that knowledge, but above all we have to sit down with people like Tita. To listen. To learn to respect everything that the homemade preparation of traditional mountain sausages that almost no longer exists transmits to us; to accept that if contemporary gastronomy does not soak up all this while it can, it will have, in part, certified its failure. Let's see that a butelo is much more than a sausage. It is, in reality, a window to a world that is disappearing, a world from which we come and that will survive, at least, as long as Tita continues making butelos in her house, continues turning on her stove and continues wanting to tell her story.
