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Karla Vasquez, author of The SalviSoul Cookbook. Ren Fuller hide caption
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Karla Vasquez, author of The SalviSoul Cookbook.
Ren FullerAbout a decade ago, Karla Tatiana Vasquez tried learning 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 an infant, and grew up eating food from her homeland. She thought it would be easy to find recipes.
"I went to the internet and I did a Google search and I found two books, which I thought immediately I was like, 'Wow, this is absurdo,'" Vasquez said.
It felt absurd to her because there are more than two and a half million Salvadoran people living in the U.S. 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. That history of mass migration got Vasquez thinking that she needed to do something to safeguard Salvadoran culture.
Her idea became SalviSoul, a platform launched in 2015 dedicated to preserving her traditional food culture through stories, cooking classes, recipes. And now, that mission has turned into The SalviSoul Cookbook: Salvadoran Recipes and The Women Who Preserve Them. Publishing April 30, it's the first U.S. cookbook focused on Salvadoran food from a major publishing house.
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The SalviSoul Cookbook, Salvadoran Recipes and the Women Who Preserve Them Ten Speed Press hide caption
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The SalviSoul Cookbook, Salvadoran Recipes and the Women Who Preserve Them
Ten Speed PressOne of the recipes she collected is a Salvadoran version of the spiced grain-based beverage horchata. On a sunny day in the Adams-Normandie neighborhood near downtown Los Angeles, Vasquez walked NPR's A Martinez through how the drink is prepped.
"We will toast this medley of seeds. And after they've been toasted, we put them in the blender. We strain it, and then we sweeten it." she said, "Almost everything in life is better toasted, I think."
As Vasquez darted back and forth in her kitchen, she said that the book started coming together 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 started seeking stories and recipes from her community and got responses from around the world.
"I wasn't expecting to get people calling me from like Minnesota writing me emails from Paris." she said. "Like there were people as close as like Crenshaw District, as far away as people in Abu Dhabi."
