A conversation with Karla Tatiana Vasquez, the author of the first Salvadoran cookbook published in the U.S., The Salvisoul Cookbook.
Yet Vasquez, a first-generation Salvadoran American, saw her job as sharing the food knowledge of Salvi women with the world. When she began her project to collect and share Salvi cuisine in 2015, Vasquez offered a series of workshops, cooking classes, and community engagement initiatives from her home base in Los Angeles, rooting her work in the vibrant local Salvadoran community around her.
As you were building out this project, from blog to book, how did you draw a line between what was important for you to know, versus what you needed to document for other people? because she is an anthropologist. Some don’t see her that way because she works as a street vendor in a part of Los Angeles known for Salvadoran culture. But she is an anthropologist, because her menu is a case study on what flavors sell the most, and that tells her how many different kinds of Salvadorans are in the city.
I also know how important it is to be the first, or one of the first, to get something written down. When I was in cooking school, one of the students asked the teacher, “Why do we call it an omelet?” The student was Middle Eastern, the teacher was Korean American, and here I was as a Salvadoreña, and we’re all realizing that it’s so seared into what we know as food culture that we hadn’t thought twice about it.
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