The new Salvadoran cookbook SalviSoul is finally here. Why did it take so long?

Food never came out of nowhere for Karla Tatiana Vásquez. The stories always continued.

Every time his grandmother or mother cooked, Vásquez knew something special was coming. His food brought back memories, especially about El Salvador, the homeland they had fled in the late 1980s during the country's civil war.

Vásquez was born in the Central American nation but had no memory of it. She was a baby when her family took her to Los Angeles, where many family members ended up settling. As a child, Vásquez had a hard time saying “Salvadoran” without stumbling on the rollercoaster of a word.

At school, she struggled with anxiety and a sense of belonging. She felt lost.

But at the table she felt punished.

Between bites of tortilla and the cold plate of ground beef salpicón de res, Vásquez's grandmother, mother, father and aunts took turns unraveling stories that served as fragments of a larger tapestry that made up her identity.

He began to find his place in the world. She got answers to lingering questions about who she was and where she came from. She took those storytelling moments seriously. She heard.

“We're not just saying words here,” Vásquez remembers thinking to herself. “There is something my parents are processing. “There is a quality here that feels precious.”

Their stories were vivid.

Vázquez could see the mango trees. He could imagine the coffee plantations. He could feel the grit it took to wake up at 4 in the morning to go to the fields to pick coffee.

Every night, around the table, surrounded by family and food, these stories played like a movie in her mind.

“This is where I'm from,” she told herself.

It makes sense that Vásquez, trained as a journalist, chef and gastronomic historian, does not write just any book about her life or her culture. This month she publishes “The SalviSoul Cookbook,” the first Salvadoran cookbook to appear on a Big Five imprint.

The feat is part of a journey that has been almost a decade in the making. Since 2015, she runs SalviSoul, a website and media brand focused on Salvadoran cuisine and the women who preserve and share their culinary knowledge through recipes, cooking classes, and live events. Around the same time, she began trying to capture the recipes and stories she was collecting into a draft cookbook.

At first, many doors were closed to him, says Vásquez. It took years to find an agent to represent “SalviSoul” and for publishers to take notice. Until now, only a handful of small-edition, self-published Salvadoran cookbooks have been available, including the highly regarded 2013 “Delicious El Salvador,” by Los Angeles-based author and cooking teacher Alicia Maher.

A publishing agent told him that the “American public” didn't know, and perhaps didn't care, about Salvadoran cuisine.

“I am the American public,” Vásquez thought. “There are a lot of people who look like me who want this book.”

That thought kept her going, until she sold her book to Ten Speed ​​Press. Ten Speed ​​Press, one of the country's leading cookbook publishers, is an imprint of Crown Publishing Group, which is a subsidiary of Penguin Random House. “The SalviSoul Cookbook” debuts April 30 and features 80 Salvadoran recipes and stories about the 25 matriarchs who shared them with Vásquez.

“For me, making the book a cookbook was the most honest way to write this story,” Vasquez says. “I think a big part of the reason the cookbook is stories and recipes is because that's how I've come to understand my Sage education. “That's how I was able to touch him being so far away from him.”

Vásquez inside his kitchen in 2020, while working to publish “The SalviSoul Cookbook.”

(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

“Stories have been my food. The stories have taught me something about life,” she says. “The stories have taught me something about love, loss and war. “He taught me something about sarcasm.”

Releasing the book to the world also taught him about perseverance.

It all started with the craving for salpicón. She had never made the refreshing salad of lean minced meat, mint, radish, red onion and lime juice. But he wanted to recapture the dish and the feelings it evoked on quiet Saturday afternoons with the family, relaxing and laughing.

At that time, he searched the Internet for a recipe but couldn't find it. He tried to look for Salvadoran cookbooks but couldn't find it. She discovered a self-published book and another from El Salvador that was out of print and selling for $100 online.

It was then that he decided to do something about the lack of Central American voices in the world of food and create the website SalviSoul.

Vasquez, standing, leads a 2019 SalviSoul cooking class on how to make Salvadoran quesadillas.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

For Vásquez, the project became a continuation of the journey she had begun as a child, listening to stories over dinner. She wanted to know herself and her country of origin.

“El Salvador is a small corner of the world, but it has been the most important question of my life,” he says.

It began with the most revered person in his life: his maternal grandmother, Lucía Campos Monterrosa, whom Vásquez affectionately calls Mama Lucy. She was Vásquez's first interview for the book. Mama Lucy became something of her muse and gave Vásquez not only her blessing but also the confidence to leave his job and devote herself to his book.

These juicy Salvadoran chicken sandwiches are filled with marinated grilled chicken and fresh, crispy vegetables and lightly sautéed.

(Katrina Frederick / For The Times)

In 2017, Vásquez took to social media to put out a call for interviews. She received dozens of responses from people across the country who wanted to volunteer their Salvadoran mothers.

About a year later, Mama Lucy died. Overwhelmed by grief, Vásquez thought she would never finish the book.

Ultimately, writing the book helped Vásquez understand his pain, he said. Listening to and telling these women's stories about her resilience helped her heal.

There's the daddy stuffing recipe from Patricia De La Torre, a woman who feels that one of the earthquakes she experienced in Los Angeles the day she met her future husband may have actually been a warning for the turbulent relationship to come. .

There is Laura Munguía's beef soup recipe, which the cook says she associates with family trips to the beach, her childhood and her good times, a departure from her heartbreaking story about the clandestine trip she made to the United States, crossing the desert. standing.

A comforting bowl of beef soup made with beef shank, chayote, yucca, corn and cabbage.

(Katrina Frederick / For The Times)

And there's a recipe for flor de izote with eggs from Vásquez's mother, Teresa, who often cooks for her husband, Carlos, whose support and smart gestures during a robbery decades ago made Teresa realize that he was her real one. love.

“These stories talk about how we make decisions at a certain moment. It tells us a lot about how we move in this life,” says Vásquez. “Here are women who survived, who loved, who laughed and who prepared fortifying food for the soul.”

“The SalviSoul Cookbook” author Karla Tatiana Vásquez will be at the LA Times Book Festival on Saturday, April 20.

(Katrina Frederick / For The Times)

Find Karla Tatiana Vásquez in the Los Angeles Times book festival on Saturday, April 20, at booth 410, where he will answer questions about “The SalviSoul Cookbook,” from 11 a.m. to noon.

The recipes