By time and place .

Molybdenum-vanadium stainless steel, high in carbon. It isn't the most forgiving steel to work, and that is exactly why we chose it. It holds its edge for longer, and an edge that holds is already half of what makes a good knife. It hardens in controlled-atmosphere furnaces, with the temperature watched down to the degree.

After that there is no going back (either it tempered well, or it is no good). It is the part of the knife no one sees while slicing a tomato in a hurry. It may well be the most important part of all.

In 1977, Curel made knives for the people right next door, for the local market, and chances are no one dreamed of much more. But the orders began arriving from further afield. That forced us to invest: better machines, better furnaces, tighter costs without giving an inch on what truly matters, which is the cut.

And what was a small provincial workshop ended up sending half its output beyond the country's borders. The craft is the same one we have practised for almost fifty years. What grew, and grew well, was the reach.

There are factories that bet everything on the machine and workshops that bet everything on the craftsman. Here we don't choose, because on its own neither one gets there. The grinding and the polishing come off the CNC with a consistency no human arm could keep up for a whole shift.

But the assembly, the finishing and the final sharpening still pass through the hands of master cutlers, people who sense in an instant what a machine would take time to measure. And it is at that border, the border of touch, that we decide whether a piece comes out merely correct or genuinely well made.

More than seventy per cent of what leaves here are knives, and around them live the pocket knives and the kitchen utensils that round out the range. We could fill this page with the usual words (excellence, commitment, quality) and not one of them would say what the edge says better.

A good knife is not praised in a brochure. You pick it up, you cut, and you know at once. That is why we prefer to let it speak: in half the kitchens of Portugal, and in the other half scattered across markets far from here.