My Rio de Janeiro: A Cookbook

A love letter to Rio de Janeiro told through approximately 90 recipes organized by neighborhood. Leticia Moreinos Schwartz, a Carioca living in the United States, takes readers on a culinary tour from Leblon to Copacabana to the hillside markets of Santa Teresa, sharing the dishes that define each area along with personal stories of growing up in the city.

Why Start Here

This book works best for cooks who want Brazilian food with a sense of place. Rather than organizing recipes by course or ingredient, Schwartz arranges them by the neighborhoods where she encountered them. You get shrimp and catupiry cheese turnovers from a botequim in Leblon, yucca crackers from the beaches of Ipanema, and chocolate-Brazil nut cake inspired by a specialty grocery in Copacabana.

The approach gives each recipe context and story, making the food feel rooted in real life rather than abstracted into a generic cookbook format. Schwartz is a trained chef (her previous book, The Brazilian Kitchen, won the Gourmand World Cookbook Award for Best Latin Cookbook), so the instructions are precise and professional while remaining accessible. She includes classic Carioca dishes like feijoada and farofa alongside lesser-known regional preparations that reflect the multicultural layers of Rio’s food scene.

What to Expect

A hardcover at 208 pages with photography that captures both the food and the city. The recipes lean toward home-style Carioca cooking, with some restaurant-inspired dishes mixed in. You will need a few specialty ingredients like dende oil and catupiry cheese, but most recipes use widely available pantry staples. This is a focused, regional book rather than a comprehensive survey of all Brazilian cuisine, which makes it an excellent companion to a broader cookbook.