Between national and international: the edition of cookbooks in Brazil

Abstract

At the turn of the 20th century to the 21st century, there is a boom in the production of cookbooks in Brazil, starting to compose a representative fraction of the Brazilian publishing market. In order to understand
characteristics of such expansion, in-depth interviews were carried out with editors and the collections of the National Library Foundation and the Integrated Library System of the University of São Paulo were consulted. We analysed the social determinants of a cosmopolitan production from the beginning, from which an editorial genre and a relatively autonomous subfield was constituted, with its own hierarchies and classifications. Multiple agents began to have repercussions on the appearance and meaning of these books, in which photography and aesthetics gained ample evidence.