The Brief

It all started with salpicón.

Nine years ago, Karla Tatiana Vasquez wanted to make the seasoned minced meat dish with radish and fresh mint that’s a staple in El Salvador.

She called her grandmother, Mama Lucy, for the recipe. It satisfied her salpicón craving — but it also made her curious to know if there were documented Salvadoran recipes available for her to come back to whenever she wanted.

When she looked online, she was dismayed to find only two cookbooks, both self-published — and one of them sold out.

This month, Vasquez is finally rectifying that omission with her cookbook, The SalviSoul Cookbook: Salvadoran Recipes and the women who preserve them — a compilation book of stories and recipes for Salvadorans who añoran, or long for, their homeland.

Salvadoran salpicón

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Courtesy of Ren Fuller

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Connection to her roots

Growing up, Vazquez was constantly searching for a connection to El Salvador, which she left behind in 1988 as a baby during the country’s civil war. Her family moved to Los Angeles where thousands of other Salvadorans also took refuge.

But it was always food, the dishes her mother, grandmother and other women in her life made, that was the strongest connection to her roots.

“I was trying to alleviate that pain that told me you're from a place you're not sure you’ll live [there] again,” said Vasquez.

She heard often that those who left El Salvador behind would forget who they are or where they come from. That was not a reality Vasquez wanted for herself.

Karla Vasquez

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Courtesy of Ren Fuller

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“If I can figure out how to touch home in the kitchen, and cook something, then I know how to find myself within myself,” said Vasquez.

She began trying to write down recipes for Salvadoran dishes. But when Vasquez would ask her mother to break down a recipe with measurements for staples like arroz frito, her mother couldn’t give her a direct answer. She would ask "how much salt do you add to this dish?" and her mother would say “Ay Karla, tu palader te dice" — Your palette will tell you.

“I thought it was this mysterious thing that I just didn’t have,” Vasquez said. Her grandmother would assure her and tell her that it will come to her. And it did, over time.

(Her grandmother, who was one of her biggest champions, recently passed away. Vasquez dedicates the cookbook to her).

" I feel like this book is only scratching the surface of everything I have learned in this journey. We have so much" — Karla Vasquez

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Courtesy of Ren Fuller

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SalviSoul features a range of Salvadoran dishes, with chapter headings like “Salvadoran Essentials” laying out pupusas de loroco (an edible small green flower), or riguas (a sweet corn cake wrapped in plantain leaves, filled with cheese or refried beans), and “Antojitos” (cravings), describing how to make empanadas de platano con leche.

There's also recipes for conejo parillado (grilled rabbit) and ceviche de pescado, which she learned from Salvadoran women in L.A.

The beauty of Salvadoran cuisine is reflected on the pages, with hues of orange, pink and green, all inspired by the produce you find in El Salvador like jocotes, mamey, alguashte and mangoes. Vasquez says Salvadoran foods are already very vibrant and she channeled those colors onto the pages.

"Salvi cuisine loves flora and fauna. We love eating the flowers that are edible in El Salvador," she says.

Weaved in are the personal anecdotes from the women who share their recipe. “I feel like every immigrant has an odyssey to tell,” said Vasquez.

Salvadorans make up one of the largest Latino populations in the U.S., and Los Angeles is home to the largest Salvadoran diaspora.

The signs of Salvis in L.A. are everywhere, from panaderias and pupuserias to our own Salvadoran Community Corridor in Pico Union, where murals of Monseñor Oscar Romero remind Salvis that our saint is always looking after us.

A likeness of Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was assassinated in 1980 near the start of the civil war in El Salvador, on a mural off a stretch of Vermont Ave. known as the El Salvador Community Corridor.

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LESLIE BERESTEIN ROJAS

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LAist

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Nothing but pupusas

When she would talk to other Salvis and other Latinos about her project, she constantly heard the same narrative — pupusas were the only recognizable Salvadoran food and there was nothing more.

Another person told her the only interesting cuisines in Latin America came from Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, or Brazil. She was shocked.

Pasteles de hongo. Achiote powder is used to give the masa for pasteles the orange hue and is also used in other dishes like Salvadoran enchiladas.

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Courtesy of Ren Fuller

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“The myth was that there was nada, but I had this feeling, I bet there's a lot, and I bet that people are just — we're just repeating what we're hearing,” said Vasquez.

She set out to find out what makes Salvadoran cuisine, talking to an anthropology professor based in El Salvador, who told Vasquez that Salvi cuisine is fusion cuisine.

"We use a lot of ingredients that are native to Mesoamerica. Corn, tomatoes, beans, ayote, like, those are all things that are in the cuisine. Then there's also ingredients like, plantains, right? Those are definitely more Caribbean I feel because of how they made their way from Africa," said Vasquez.

She says Salvi cuisine loves to play with different flavors: "We love sour, we love tart, we love bitter."

Vasquez says even the cooking methodologies come from different cultures. Nuegados for example is a fried yucca patty that has a brown sugar molasses drizzled on top — Vasquez thinks of Jewish latkes when she thinks of nuegados.

And a lot of Salvi cooking is also done over a fire, so a lot of dishes have that fire-grilled flavor to them.

Preserve point of view

Initially Vasquez doubted whether she would have enough to say in her cookbook. But she cast that doubt aside and started with the recipes from her family.

She knew her mother had at least 40 recipes under belt. And speaking with other women, she learned more.

Vasquez said that the women she interviewed reacted differently to her questions — some felt chastised for not having every detail written down, others felt embarrassed. Vasquez assured them she wasn’t questioning their methods.

Some felt they had nothing to share, that their dish wasn’t special, that it was “nothing." So instead of arguing with them, Vasquez asked them to share what they thought was nothing — and from there, she learned recipes she had never heard of, like gallo en chicha, a rooster cooked in homemade wine that takes five days to make from scratch.

“I want to appreciate what you consider delicious and once we've isolated how to get there, I want to make sure that we can still access it and replicate it,” said Vasquez. “I want to preserve your point of view in there and we can do that through this recipe.”

Pupusas de loroco, an edible flower that's used in many Salvadoran dishes.

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Courtesy of Ren Fuller

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Timing is everything

Vasquez started this journey in 2015 by creating an online community. On her Salvi Soul Instagram she shared pictures of different Salvadoran foods and held Facebook Live conversations with other Salvadoran chefs.

Then in 2020 the L.A. Times wrote a piece about her efforts to make Salvi Soul into a reality. The piece noted a frequent wall that Vasquez was always hitting — Salvadoran cuisine was unknown and major publishers couldn’t buy into the unknown.

The piece was pivotal to Vasquez’s journey because it created what she describes as “a big splash," and more networking connections opened up.

This was the year when the racial reckoning over the summer of 2020 compelled businesses to think twice about their diversity practices.

Bon Appétit came under fire when chef Sohla El-Waylly called out her previous employer on their diversity problems, like underpaying chefs of color.

Jeanine Cummins' controversial novel American Dirt — which was highly praised by a white audience but criticized by Latinx authors and readers — also highlighted the publishing industry's practices of favoring white authors retelling of immigrant experiences and the lack of Latinx representation in the industry.

All of this is crucial to understanding how Vasquez’s book finally got a green light a couple years later with an agent who, Vasquez says, was "beyond ecstatic" to get this book out.

In total, the cookbook features 33 recipes. But Vasquez says she didn’t create just a cookbook, but a community of Salvadoran women, whether it's the people on her team who are from El Salvador or those she met along the way here in Los Angeles.

And her work won’t stop here. She’s currently cooking up another concept. For now, she eagerly awaits the book's release on April 30 and the reaction from her community.