This is Ana Luiza Trajano’s 4th book. In it, she widens her travels researching “roots” Brazilian cuisine, as she sees it, to also devote herself to everyday home cooking. The first-person narrative refers to the universe that spawned the collected recipes. The author’s taste is particularly highlighted by family life, her guide through countless recipes that come from the Brazilian domestic and urban tradition.
The reader could chalk it up as another book of recipes following the tradition of the old Comer Bem Dona Benta, which have been available since the 1940’s. It wouldn’t be terribly original had it not been for the author’s particular vision on this list commonly found recipes. Thus, what grants the book its originality is the author’s point of view, now added to the collection of works known as “cookbooks”. This expression encompasses every written material about the art of cooking or/and relative to the different existing cuisines and cooking styles. An universe that includes various types of books: the old and the new, available in libraries and bookstores; the binders and notebooks filled with recipes that are found in homes, convents, hotels, castles, hospitals, institutions such as factories, businesses, schools, children’s homes, and prisons; and, also, books relating to food critique.
We should also consider that “cookbooks” have been fundamental in stablishing a Western gastronomy. This means that the creation of a specific field that shaped and mediated culinary “preferences” greatly relied on the emergence of these publications. Although this type of cooking is closely linked to “real life cooking” (which is practiced daily in each and every society), cookbooks do not set out to reproduce it, purely and simply. In registering, recording, and publishing it in various platforms, cookbooks end up transforming what is real into a taste paradigm and, eventually, into a mark of the identity of a whole people – as it happens, for instance, in France, where a culture of writing about the art of cooking generate style of cuisine that is emblematic in the West.
In Brazil, the influence of French gastronomy began in the 19th century and is reinforced by the arrival of famed French chefs like Claude Troisgros and Laurent Suaudeau, among others, after the 70’s. These chefs began to appreciate and make use of Brazilian ingredients, either native or acclimated, such as the jabuticaba, pitanga, mango, jackfruit, manioc flour, and mandioquinha, among many more, giving rise to what is currently defined as “Brazilian Cuisine”, which is practiced by local professionals that constantly revisit and reinterpret the traditional aspects of Brazilian cooking.
Due to Trajano’s efforts, this mark is also present as she approaches tradition with a modern gaze, holding on to the things that she believes to be worthy, seeking to project them into time. And so, many ingredients that were virtually forgotten – such as the prosaic lambari – reemerge; some “backwards steps” are taken in this search for a higher quality, such as the recipe for pudim de leite that doesn’t make use of condensed milk.
Making these recipes available was the purpose of Dona Benta. Time went by and gastronomy developed along multiple directions until we lost sight of its domestic roots. Trajano’s books seeks to bring us back to that place, while updating it. It’s original in the fact that it no longer addresses the outdated “homemaker”, a character that became undone in the last few decades. It wishes to dialog with those who practice home cooking, regardless of their gender, and who are not “supposed to” toil over the stove day in and day out. Nowadays, the majority of the middle class doesn’t eat at home. It’s only natural that, when cooking at home, we seek pleasure and not only “nourishment”. If this book reaches this one goal, it will have fulfilled its worthy cause – and these are our wishes for it.