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Kousha Navidar: You're listening to All Of It. I'm Kousha Navidar, in for Alison Stewart. A new cookbook presents a diverse mosaic of the Salvadoran immigrant experience, while spotlighting Salvi culinary traditions, titled The SalviSoul Cookbook. The book includes 80 recipes from around 30 matriarchs, including stewed beef and potatoes, mojarra frita, which is fried fish, horchata, and sandwiches de pollo, just to name a few. The SalviSoul Cookbook is out now.
Karla Tatiana Vasquez is a food writer, a recipe developer, a food stylist, and food justice advocate based in Los Angeles, whose work focuses on increasing healthy food accessibility in low-income communities. She is joining us ahead of her event at the Museum of Food and Drink on Water Street, in Brooklyn, tomorrow. If you're interested in checking that out, it's tomorrow, Friday, May 24th. It starts at 7:00 PM. Karla, welcome to All Of It.
Karla Tatiana Vasquez: Thank you so much, Kousha. I'm so happy to be here with you.
Kousha Navidar: Happy to have you here. Listeners, we want to hear from you, too. Do you have a favorite Salvadoran food or restaurant in the city? Are you a fan of pupusas like me? What kind of pupusas do you usually order or make at home? Give us a call, send us a text at 212-433-9692. That's 212-433-WNYC. Karla, I'd love to just go into the origin of SalviSoul. What is one dish that often reminds you of family and home?
Karla Tatiana Vasquez: There are so many, but definitely the impetus for this project was salpicón de res, which you could describe as a type of meat salad, because you cook the beef and then you allow it to cool, and then you mince it, and then you add a lot of vegetables to it, and you have it with frijoles licuados, some rice. That was just the epitome of rest and comfort in my childhood. It was just something that let me know it's Saturday, we can rest as a family and enjoy each other.
Kousha Navidar: Who made it in your family?
Karla Tatiana Vasquez: Usually, it was my mom, my grandmother, my Mama Lucy. It was always the women who were creating these experiences that to me, really swept me away into what is El Salvador, or what does it mean to touch home when you are far away from it. I really believe that food is how we touch home. Sometimes recipes can serve as addresses for the people we love, because they remind us of them, and they remind us of these moments that were just formative for us.
Kousha Navidar: I'd love to talk a little bit more about that idea of culinary traditions in Salvadorian cuisine. What makes Salvadoran traditions in the kitchen unique?
Karla Tatiana Vasquez: I think there's a lot that we can learn about the process of this experience. Often, I heard in this process that, "Why should there be a Salvadoran cookbook? It's got the same ingredients as other cuisines from Latin America. What's so special about it?" Or I'd hear things that say, "Oh, it's such a small country." The thing is that there is so much tradition, even within the regions of El Salvador, that make them super distinct.
For me, it always felt like the people I heard shared their experiences about food or being in El Salvador. They just always seem to be food-obsessed. Once you start looking into it, you realize how much Salvadoran cuisine celebrates the flora and fauna of the land. I remember eating flowers for breakfast because we eat the national flower of El Salvador. That was just something that I thought was so cool. I was like, "Wow. We eat flowers for breakfast. How awesome." Of course, we eat a lot of these Mesoamerican ingredients, like corn, frijoles, but then there's a lot of these tropical flavors.
You have plantain, you have mango, pineapple. It does become this wonderful myriad of flavors that come together with so many different influences. Yes, it's been super exciting. I've written a book, but I feel like I only know about 7% to 10% of what is Salvadoran cuisine.
Kousha Navidar: Are edible flowers a part of the book? Are there recipes that incorporate that concept?
Karla Tatiana Vasquez: Yes, absolutely. There's actually three edible flowers on the cover of the book. I often would hear these narratives about how meat-heavy Latin cuisine is, or how unhealthy meat habits can be within Latin American cuisines like Salvadoran food. I always thought that was a wild thing to say compared to my upbringing. There was so many vegetables. Some of the flowers that you'll find in the book are flores de loroco, flores de izote, there's a dish for pacaya, which gave me an education about how fond we are of bitter flavors.
Similarly to Chinese cuisine, that will really highlight the bitterness and not hide it. That's how Salvi cuisine is. Here, in Western cooking, if there's something bitter, you really want to put some extra fat or something sweet to not make it so pronounced. Whenever I'm cooking pacayas, and I ask my mom like, "Hey, what can I do to balance out the bitterness," she was so stunned. She's like, "No, why would you do that? Then you can't taste the flower."
Kousha Navidar: Wow. Listeners, if you're listening and you're wondering what kind of cuisine is this we're talking about, Salvadoran cuisine with Karla Tatiana Vasquez, who's a food writer, a recipe developer, and a food stylist. Her book, The SalviSoul Cookbook is out now. Listeners, we're taking your calls as well. Do you have a favorite Salvadoran food, or maybe a restaurant in the city? Do you have a favorite kind of pupusa? Do you have a question about how to cook more effectively in the Salvadoran cuisine?
Give us a call or send us a text. We're at 212-433-9692. That's 212-433-WNYC. Karla, SalviSoul, you launched SalviSoul, which is a platform dedicated to preserving your traditional food and culture through stories, and cooking classes, and recipes. You started that in 2015. It's almost a decade later. How has it evolved?
Karla Tatiana Vasquez: My goodness, this really started with a craving. I spoke about salpicón, and it was a call to action for me to have that craving, "I'm going to learn the recipe. I'm going to write it down so that I can visit it as many times as I need to." The beginning of that journey just illuminated a path that said, "It's not enough to just know this one recipe. We have to go deeper. We have to go further."
To my shock, when I looked for cookbooks at that time, there were only two that were available, which were both self-published. I thought, "Wow, this is absurdo. This is absurd." There are so many Salvadorans in the country and just worldwide. A lot of us have a transnational identity. We have roots in El Salvador obviously, but we're also in different parts of the world, and we're trying to hold both. Not necessarily assimilate, that's a very different kind of way to exist as an immigrant, but to hold capacity for both, so that we feel grounded without having to compromise.
That's the feeling that moved me into action, and I started to look for women who were wanting to document these food ways with me. I put a call out, I interviewed women from my family, family friends, and eventually it became a movement, I want to say, of Salvadorans finding each other and realizing, "Hey, food is how we touch home."
We don't have recipes documented. We don't have a way to access these food ways, these maps that show us something about what life was like in El Salvador. As I collected these recipes, what also became a part of the work was their stories, of course.
A lot of the stories that came through these cooking sessions were real stories that taught us something about living.
Kousha Navidar: There's 33 Salvadoran women that the book features stories and recipes from. Is there one story in particular that has really-- I mean, all of them you'll remember forever, but is there one that right now really sticks out to you?
Karla Tatiana Vasquez: I think one of my favorite ones that I wrote early on, even in the proposal, is titled Maybe the Earthquake. It's a story about what happens when you have fallen in love, but let's say that it is someone you meet when there's an earthquake. I really enjoyed the experience of capturing the story because what I found in all of the women who were excellent cooks is that they were also excellent storytellers.
They never once experienced writer's block because they know exactly what to do with the listener, and they have you at the edge of your seat. I felt like I could hear the score of this story that they were telling me. I could see the textures. The colors were so vibrant. Everything was just so alive, and this story may be the earthquake, I really loved because it's a story that highlights how a woman finds her freedom, and how empowering that was for her to finally have agency, and how hearing that kind of story is a part of the nourishment that we do when we sit at the table and we eat together.
Then we hear these stories that give us the strength to face life. So much of cooking, yes, it's very romantic these days, to be in food and to be swept away by how sensual it is, but I think we've forgotten that food is really how we survive and what we do when we're surviving together and we're nourishing our physical form, helps us nourish our soul that is boosting our morale to keep going. That is what I hope people feel when they read these stories and cook from the book.
Kousha Navidar: Yes, nourishment in all forms. We're talking to Karla Tatiana Vásquez, who's a food writer. Her book is The SalviSoul Cookbook. We're talking about it right now. We're also taking listener calls. We have our first caller, Karla. This is Jennifer in Westchester. Jennifer, I understand you might be cooking right now, in fact?
Jennifer: Yes, yes, I'm doing dinner prep right now.
Kousha Navidar: Awesome. Well, welcome to the show. What's on your mind?
Jennifer: Growing up, we always would have pasteles, one of our favorite things. It's basically just like a meat pocket. It's like a corn or we use masa to make the shell, and then we stuff it with ground beef and potatoes and diced carrots and peas, and it's just amazing, but whenever I would talk about the pasteles, my other friends from Puerto Rico or Colombia or Ecuador, they would be like, "No, that's an empanada," and I'm like, "No, no, no. Empanadas are different. Empanadas are made out of-- They're sweet. They have a platano. Their case is made out of platanos, and they're stuffed with a sweet milk custard." We would always have this back and forth about what is an empanada and what is a pastele.
Kousha Navidar: I just want to make sure, Jennifer, I read here your parents are Salvadoran, is that right?
Jennifer: Yes, yes. They immigrated here back in the '70s.
Kousha Navidar: Any insight on that Karla? Which one is right? Pasteles, empanadas, are they the same? Are they different?
Karla Tatiana Vásquez: It's amazing. I have very relatable experience, and similarly, there is Salvadorans we have ensalada, which if you translate it means salad, but that's actually the name of a beverage. It's not an actual salad. I actually really have enjoyed learning that there is no right, there is no wrong. There are so many food traditions that you can trace back to indigenous people groups, and they each had a different way to call it. One of the things I've loved, I get this question a lot of, "What's different? What makes you different from Cuban or Mexican or whatever?"
I've learned to say that similarly to children who come from the same parents, you come from the same individuals, you're made up of the same stuff, but if your mom calls you your sister's name, it's still going to be upsetting because that's not your name. I really love following what the tradition is. If the name is pastelitos, then that's what I'm going to call it, or pasteles. If the name is empanadas, that's what we're going to call it. There is a way to trace a lot of these connections, and there's little stories. The food history of different dishes is so fascinating, but it really just tells you how food culture is alive.
It changes. There's an ebb and flow to it. If we had one specific, this is what's correct and this is what's not, then that would actually mean that the culture is dying, because no one's walking with it into the future. There's no evolution of it.
Kousha Navidar: Very quickly, I want to get to one of the recipes in there too that I think touches on this. In the book, you have a recipe for curtido, which is a combination of cabbage, onion, carrot spice, oregano, and vinegar. I'm looking at the clock. We've got about a minute and a half left, but I understand there's different methods for preparing curtido as well. Is that right?
Karla Tatiana Vásquez: Yes, absolutely. There's different methods. A lot of folks will par cook the vegetables and then add their vinegar mixture, but there are some folks that don't enjoy vinegar. Then there's other folks, actually, the traditional way to prepare it was with vinagre casero, which means homemade vinegar, which was often made with pineapple peels. Now people use apple cider vinegar because you may not have time to make your own pineapple vinegar.
It's a lot of adaptation, I think, for me, it just is, it's an effort to keep this food culture, this food practice alive using what you have in your pantry, using what you have in your new home, which often is the work of your survival. You are fighting to always have a grasp at home. Yes, curtido can be made in several different ways. Some people totally [unintelligible 00:15:59] the vinegar idea and only use citrus. I enjoy that. I enjoy learning all the different adaptations of a recipe because it's someone saying, in spite of all the things that I may not have or my limitations or my allergies or whatever, I will insist on practicing this food ways that connects me to home.
Kousha Navidar: That's wonderful, and it sounds like a major theme as well that cuts through all the stories and the recipes about Salvadoran food and the traditions. Would you say that's fair?
Karla Tatiana Vásquez: Yes, 100%.
Kousha Navidar: Yes. Listeners, if you would like to find out more about Salvadoran food and these stories of these 33 women and just the traditions and the tasty parts of it, go check out The SalviSoul Cookbook. It's out now. We've been talking to the author, Karla Tatiana Vásquez, the food writer, the recipe developer, and the food stylist. Karla, thank you so much.
Karla Tatiana Vásquez: Thank you so much for having me. I've had a pleasure.

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