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

For Carla Tatiana Vazquez, food has never been an isolated situation. The story always continued.

Every time her grandmother or mother cooked, Vazquez felt something special was coming her way. Their food unlocked memories, especially of El Salvador, the homeland they fled from in the late 1980s during the civil war.

Vázquez was born in a Central American country but had no memories of the country. She was young when her family spirited her away to Los Angeles, where much of her family ended up settling. In her childhood, Vazquez struggled to say “Salvadoreño” without tripping over her verbal roller coaster.

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

But at the dinner table, she felt grounded.

Over tortillas and salpicón de res, Vázquez’s grandmother, mother, father and aunt took turns unraveling stories that serve as pieces of the larger tapestry that makes up her identity.

Vazquez’s favorite dish as a child was salpicon de res, a beef salad with crunchy radishes, fresh mint, lime and salt.

(Katrina Frederick/For the Times)

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

“We’re not just saying words here,” Vazquez remembers thinking to himself. “There are things that parents are considering. There are qualities here that we feel are valuable.”

Their stories were vivid.

Vasquez could see a mango tree. She could imagine a coffee plantation. She felt the grit it took to get up at 4 a.m. and go to the fields to pick coffee.

These stories played like movies in her mind every night around the dinner table, surrounded by her extended family and food.

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

It’s no surprise that Vázquez, who trained as a journalist, chef, and food historian, would not write a book about his life or culture. This month she publishes her “The Salvi Soul Cookbook”. This is the first Salvadoran cookbook to be featured in a Big Five publication.

This feat is part of a journey nearly 10 years in the making. Since 2015, she has been running her brand, SalviSoul, a website and media centering around Salvadoran cuisine and women preserving and sharing their culinary knowledge through recipes, cooking classes, and live her events. Around the same time, she began trying to compile the recipes and stories she was collecting into a draft of her cookbook.

Vasquez said many doors were closed to her at first. It took years to find an agent to represent “Salvi Soul” and for a publisher to take notice. To date, only a few self-published or small-press Salvadoran cookbooks have been published. That included 2013’s acclaimed “Delicious El Salvador,” by Los Angeles-based cooking teacher and author Alicia Maher.

A book agent told her that “the American public” doesn’t know about Salvadoran cuisine and probably doesn’t care.

“I am an American citizen,” Vazquez thought to himself. “There are a lot of people who want this book just like I do.”

That idea continued to drive her until she sold her book to Ten Speed ​​Press. Ten Speed ​​Press, one of the nation’s leading cookbook publishers, is part of Crown Publishing Group, a subsidiary of Penguin Random House. “The Salvi Soul Cookbook,” released April 30, features 80 defining recipes from El Salvador and stories about the 25 matriarchs who shared them with Vazquez.

“Turning the book into a cookbook was the most honest way for me to write this story,” Vasquez says. “I think a lot of the reason cookbooks are stories and recipes is because that’s how I understand my cooking.” Salvi Cultivation. That way I could touch it even when I was far away from it. ”

Vazquez is working on publishing “The Salvi Soul Cookbook” in her kitchen in 2020.

(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)

“Stories were my sustenance. They taught me something about living,” she says. “The story taught me something about love, loss, and war. It taught me something about irony.”

By putting this book out there, she also learned about persistence.

It all started with a craving for Salpicon. She had never made a refreshing salad with chopped lean beef, mint, radish, red onion, and lime juice. But she wanted to bring back the dish and the feelings it evoked in her on lazy Saturday afternoons spent relaxing and laughing with her family.

At the time, she looked for a recipe on the Internet but couldn’t find one. She tried looking for an El Salvadoran cookbook, but she couldn’t find it. She has one of her books that was self-published and another that is out of print and online she found a book from El Salvador that sells for $100.

That’s when she decided to do something about the lack of Central American voices in the food industry and launched the SalviSoul website.

Vazquez, standing, teaches a Salvisoul cooking class in 2019 on how to make Salvadoran quesadillas.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

For Vasquez, the project was a continuation of a childhood journey of listening to stories at the dinner table. She wanted to know herself and her country of origin.

“El Salvador is a tiny little corner of the world, but that was the biggest question of my life,” she says.

She began her talk with the person she most admires in her life: her maternal grandmother, Lucia Campos Monterrosa. Vasquez affectionately calls her Mama Lucy. She was Vasquez’s first interview for the book. Mama Lucy became like her muse, and she not only gave Vasquez her blessing, but also gave her the confidence to quit her job and pursue her book.

These juicy Salvadoran chicken sandwiches are stuffed with marinated roasted chicken and fresh crunchy vegetables and drizzled with Recaudo sauce.

(Katrina Frederick/For the Times)

In 2017, Vazquez asked for an interview on social media. She received dozens of responses from people across the country who wanted to volunteer with Salvadoran mothers.

About a year later, Mama Lucy passed away. Grief-stricken, Vasquez thought she would never be able to finish reading the book.

Ultimately, writing the book helped Vazquez understand her grief, she said. Listening to and telling women’s stories of resilience helped her heal her emotional wounds.

There is also a recipe for rellenos de papa by Patricia de la Torre. She is 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 of the tumultuous relationship to come.

Laura Munguia has a recipe for sopa de res that the cook said reminds her of family trips to the beach, her childhood and good times. This is a departure from her harrowing story about her secret journey across the desert to the United States. feet.

A comforting bowl of sopa de rais made with beef shank, chayote, yuca, corn, and cabbage.

(Katrina Frederick/For the Times)

And then there’s the recipe for “Flore de Izote con Huevos” written by Vázquez’s mother, Teresa, who often cooks for her husband, Carlos, and whose recipe he used during a robbery decades ago. With his support and wise gestures, Teresa realized that he was her true love.

“These stories tell us how we make decisions at any given moment. It tells us a lot about how we move forward in this life.” says Vasquez. “Here are the women who created the soul food that survives, loves, laughs and uplifts.”

Carla Tatiana Vazquez, author of “The SalviSoul Cookbook,” will be appearing at the LA Times Festival of Books on Saturday, April 20th.

(Katrina Frederick/For the Times)

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Find Carla Tatiana Vasquez in the Los Angeles Times book festival We will be answering questions about “The Salvi Soul Cookbook” on Saturday, April 20th from 11 a.m. to noon at booth 410.