In 20th-century Brazil, the main meal is the midday almoço, built on an invariable foundation: white rice and beans (arroz e feijão), around which revolve a meat, a farofa (toasted manioc flour), and a salad. This foundation varies according to setting and occasion: frugal and dry in the sertão of the Northeast, overflowing and meaty at Sunday feijoadas, refined and Frenchified at elite receptions. Coffee (cafezinho) punctuates the day from morning to night, and doce (sweets) closes festive meals. Chateaubriand, born in the poor Paraíba and dead a magnate in São Paulo, traversed this entire scale, from dried charque in the sertão to diplomatic dinners.

A thread running through Brazilian cuisine and Chateaubriand's trajectory: lacking refrigeration, beef was preserved by covering it with coarse salt and letting it dry in the sertão wind. This salted meat feeds both the poor of the Northeast and the festive feijoada. It is the founding gesture linking the child of Umbuzeiro to the press baron.