None of her relatives have ever made quesadillas, because they’re readily available back home. Quesadilla variations are nearly endless, including those based on rice flour, yuca flour, and masa harina, with different adjustments for density and rise. Vázquez chose all-purpose flour, she says, because it was “the easiest starting point.” For her recipe, she whisks egg yolks and sugar, grates Queso Duro brand, and mixes it with milk and crema Salvadorenha, the thick top made by skimming off heavy cream to give it a light sourness. The sourness is similar to crème fraîche, so you can use that instead. In a pinch, Vázquez has substituted thinned yogurt. (Some recipes call for as many as five types of dairy, she notes, and in El Salvador, bakers who are also cheesemakers sometimes omit the crema and add only whey.)
Ideally, I’d make the quesadillas after lunch, carefully fold the cheese mixture into the sifted flour in batches, fold in heaps of egg whites to trap a few clouds of softness, cook them in a buttered skillet until they’re a mottled bronze color with a slight sheen around the edges, let them cool, and by 3 o’clock they’ll be ready to eat with a hot, strong cup of coffee.
When Vázquez was three months old, her family fled the Salvadoran civil war and settled in Los Angeles. It wasn’t until she was older, married and “doña de my casa, queen of the castle” (as she says with a laugh) that she realized she didn’t know how to make her traditional dishes. In the kitchen, she was always intimidated by her mother, a tough, fearless woman who, as a teenager, had faced off against assault rifles on the streets of San Salvador and felt the vibrations of bombs. Her mother knew all the dishes by heart and would sigh when her daughter asked questions. Vázquez remembers being told to “not reason” with them.
So she turned to her grandmother, finding a way to ask her deeper questions about her family’s past in between cookouts. “When you’re at the sink washing lettuce and I’m chopping onions and you hear that sizzle, it kind of opens a door and makes people feel at ease,” she says. She started interviewing her friends’ mothers, then worked up the courage to approach her own. The idea for a cookbook took shape, and the two learned to trust each other in the kitchen. “We get so caught up in the romance of ingredients,” Vásquez says. “We forget how important cooking is to our survival. We need someone to walk the journey with us.”
Now, her mother relies on Vázquez to make her delicious quesadillas, but she insists that Vázquez bring the ingredients home and make them there. There’s always Salvadoran cheese. Still, Vázquez, who has been teaching online cooking classes during the pandemic, encouraged her students to look for local ingredients without getting hung up on notions of authenticity. “That’s what we’re doing in the diaspora,” she says. If Parmesan is cheaper in Los Angeles than imported Salvadoran cheese, it makes sense for bakers to trade one for the other. “If you make it the so-called authentic way, will you get it?” she wonders. “And is it really authentic?”
