How ‘SalviSoul,’ a Salvadoran Cookbook, Came to Be: NPR

Karla Vasquez, author of The SalviSoul cookbook.

Ren Fuller

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Ren Fuller

Karla Vasquez, author of The SalviSoul cookbook.

Ren Fuller

About ten years ago, Karla Tatiana Vasquez tried to learn how to make her favorite dish: salpicón salvadoreño, a beef salad with radishes, mint, lime and salt.

Vasquez, a trained chef and food writer, was born in El Salvador, moved to Los Angeles as a child and grew up eating dishes from her native country. She thought it would be easy to find recipes.

“I went online and did a Google search and found two books, and I immediately thought, ‘Wow, this is absurd,’” Vasquez said.

This seemed absurd to him, because more than two and a half million Salvadorans live in the United States. Many fled the small Central American country during a brutal civil war that lasted more than a decade and ended in 1992. Others left to escape extreme poverty. and political instability in the aftermath of the war. This story of mass migration led Vasquez to think she needed to do something to save Salvadoran culture.

His idea became SalviSoul, a platform launched in 2015 dedicated to preserving its traditional food culture through stories, cooking classes, recipes. And now this mission has become The SalviSoul recipe book: Salvadoran recipes and the women who preserve them. Published on April 30, it is the first American cookbook dedicated to Salvadoran cuisine and published by a major publishing house.

The SalviSoul Cookbook, Salvadoran Recipes and the Women Who Preserve Them

Ten-speed press

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Ten-speed press

The SalviSoul Cookbook, Salvadoran Recipes and the Women Who Preserve Them

Ten-speed press

One of the recipes she collected is a Salvadoran version of horchata, a spicy grain-based drink. On a sunny day in the Adams-Normandie neighborhood near downtown Los Angeles, Vasquez explained to NPR’s A Martinez how the drink is made.

“We’re going to toast this mixture of seeds. And after toasting them, we put them in the blender. We filter it, then we sweeten it.” she said, “I think almost everything in life is better toasted.”

As Vasquez walked back and forth in her kitchen, she said the book began to take shape through her desire to interview the women in her family and learn their recipes.

But when friends heard about her project, they were excited to share recipes and stories from their families. She began researching stories and recipes from her community and got responses from all over the world.

“I didn’t expect people to be calling me from Minnesota, for example, writing me emails from Paris.” she says. “Like there are people as close as the Crenshaw district, as far away as Abu Dhabi.”

Karla Tatiana Vasquez (left), interviewed by Morning edition host A Martinez in Los Angeles.

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Alice Woelfle/NPR

She always knew there were a lot of Salvadorans in Los Angeles, but this was the first time she had a sense of the extent of the diaspora beyond the city. The interviews she collected became The SalviSoul recipe bookwith 80 recipes from 25 matriarchs.

“I absorbed the culture from the women in my family and they nourished me.” They also shared lessons about life and love. “So there was the food that nourished my physical form. And while I was at the table, these stories nourished the part of my soul that longed to connect, that longed to belong.”

Vasquez toasted a mixture of Moro, sesame and squash seeds with cinnamon and cocoa pods in a pan on the stove as she told NPR the stories she heard around the dinner table from his family.

The smell around her was almost like popcorn, but with a deeper richness.

Vasquez had difficulty convincing agents and publishers that his project was worth it. They told him they didn’t think there was interest among the general American public.

“I wrote to other agents who said, ‘Well, Karla, who are you? Do you have a restaurant? Do you have a really big Instagram page or a really big YouTube presence?’” She also faced criticism from her own side. community. “Some Salvadorans themselves told me, ‘Girl, don’t worry.’ As if we only have pupusas. All Americans want are our pupusas.”

But it was the words of her grandmother Lucy that cemented her resolve: “Esto se trata del legado de la mujer Salvadoreña”.

“She said, ‘This is the legacy of Salvadoran women.’ And she set the standard right then and there and there was no going back,” Vasquez said.

Carrying the burden of this legacy required a lot of tears, she continued, as well as the trauma of the Salvadoran community.

“We’ve been so busy surviving that sometimes we haven’t had time to evaluate what we’ve survived. And I think that’s why these storytelling sessions are happening around the table.”

She says that for her, the roots of healing from this trauma also have to do with food.

“When you have a plate of food in front of you at the table, it’s a promise of satisfaction, it’s a promise of security.”

She finally got a contract for The SalviSoul recipe book from Ten Speed ​​Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Vasquez hopes the book will serve as a document of her immigrant culture and also add context to the history and culinary culture of Los Angeles. But she asserts that the prestige of her publisher does not add legitimacy to the legacy she preserves.

“It’s not about acceptance. It’s about preserving the sazón (seasoning) that the women took care of. It’s about making sure that what is expensive to learn is not forgotten.”

The broadcast version of this story was produced by Paige Waterhouse. The digital was edited by Obed Manuel.