Cookbooks. Narrative spaces and user manuals

In the system that defines the various types of books editorial graphics deals with in the field of visual communication design, a section in itself, with its own history, structure, specific language, is that of cookbooks: veritable handbooks for the preparation of foods – and not, in a simplistic, general definition, recipe books, in that they are artefacts containing not only techniques and practices, but also plenty of information concerning foods, quantities, times, temperatures, processes, methods, garnishing – all aspects that make these books look more like technical manuals than culinary literature for reading. Or maybe, as we mentioned above, they are simply books with a double identity, whose pages encompass both genres: one, technical-scientific; the other, purely narrative. These books are artefacts that impose the stillness of a shot, obtained through the printing process, on a sector like cookery, whose recipes, having their own precise storytelling structure and sequence, are subject, wherever there remains an oral tradition, to unceasing interpolations, changes, translations, betrayals.