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Writing the first major cookbook on the cuisine of your home country is no small undertaking. Karla Tatiana Vasquez knew this from the very start of her journey towards what would become The SalviSoul Cookbook: Salvadoran Recipes and the Women Who Preserve Them. 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. The project took on new life when she put out a call to the broader Salvadoran diasporic community, receiving messages from Salvi women in Paris, in Abu Dhabi, in Michigan, in Georgia asking, “How far are you traveling?” Her response was that if she could drive there, she would find a way to get there.
“The whole premise of this book,” Vasquez told me from her home in Los Angeles, “is that Salvi women, the moms and abuelas, are the experts, but that they are not included in
