A New Salvadoran Cookbook Celebrates the Stories of Diaspora

When Oakland chef Anthony Salguero first connected with Karla Tatiana Vasquez through social media, he knew he had found a kindred spirit. Salguero owns Popoca, a restaurant in Old Oakland that serves what he calls “progressive” Salvadoran food. And Vasquez is the Los Angeles-based author of The SalviSoul Cookbook, the first Salvadoran cookbook published by a major U.S. imprint (Ten Speed Press).

The two Salvadoran Americans, both 36, say they are on a mission to spotlight their cuisine in a way that celebrates and honors the experiences of El Salvador’s diaspora in the U.S. And, for at least one night, they’ll join forces: On May 6, Vasquez will visit Popoca for a book signing and conversation with another Salvadoran standout, the poet and memoirist Javier Zamora.

While Salguero is known for using his fine-dining background to reimagine Salvadoran cuisine, Vasquez wrote her book for home cooks who want to make comfort food.

“This is cooking that your mom would make for you,” she says. “It’s soul food.”

The idea for SalviSoul came about when Vasquez was a newlywed in 2015. She turned to her grandmother for recipes — and also anecdotes from life in El Salvador.

“I got to hear stories of her not just as a grandmother, which is how I know her, but the stories of her as a woman who wanted to fall in love, a woman who wanted to go to school,” Vasquez says. “The food (I ate) growing up nourished my physical form. But, the stories nourished the parts of my soul that I really longed to understand.”

The book features stories and recipes from 33 Salvadoran women living in the diaspora. Those recipes include curtido (the classic pickled salad), tamales and pupusas, as well as ambitious entrees like grilled rabbit.

Vasquez also weaves in her own experience being born in El Salvador and raised in Los Angeles after her family fled during the country’s civil war in the 1980s. Taken all together, the cookbook reflects her efforts to connect with Salvadoran culture and heal from being separated from her homeland.

“You have a choice to be the person you want to be in the kitchen. You can touch home with the food that you eat,” Vasquez says. “A lot of the impetus of this project comes from a very vulnerable place, of fear, of anxiety, of wanting to really challenge the assumption that assimilating is the only way to survive.”

The book’s release, on April 30, comes after years of rejections. Repeatedly, Vasquez was told there wouldn’t be a large enough audience for a Salvadoran cookbook. Some members of the publishing industry would ask how Salvadoran food even differs from Mexican food.

“El Salvador is the smallest country in Central America, so I understand that it’s kind of a blind spot for people,” Vasquez says. “I felt like, hey, there’s got to be room in this conversation to let in other narratives.”

Salvadorans often feel like an overlooked minority within a minority because of their smaller numbers, says Karina Alma, assistant professor and co-director of the Central American Studies Working Group at UCLA.

“What makes this cookbook so special is that it includes narratives of women,” Alma says. “This is a type of memory, cultural memory, that would be passed down from an auntie, a grandmother, a mother, to the younger generation. … It’s really important to document our populations so that we’re not silenced in history so we’re not a forgotten people or a disappeared people.”

In reality, Salvadorans are the third largest population group of Latinos behind Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, according to the Pew Research Center. The U.S. was home to an estimated 2.5 million Salvadorans in 2021 with the largest concentration, roughly a third, in California.

So, Vasquez stuck with her goal of publishing with a major U.S. publisher, slowly building up the SalviSoul concept via freelance articles and on social media.

Salguero, who was raised in the Bay Area, has had similar experiences. Sometimes people come to Popoca and ask for chips and salsa, which are not on the menu.

“I grew up around hella Mexicans, and everybody thought I was Mexican, too,” says Salguero, whose father is from El Salvador and mother is from Puerto Rico. “I love Mexican food, I’m not hating on it… But, I want people to know that [Salvadoran food] is different, and there’s a lot to learn and a lot of depth to it.”

Salguero began cooking professionally as a teenager and then honed his skills at fine-dining restaurants for over a decade before dedicating himself to Salvadoran food. He didn’t feel fully immersed in the culture until he visited El Salvador as an adult and learned the local cooking techniques. The name of his restaurant, Popoca, means “smoke” in Nawat, an indigenous language spoken in El Salvador.

“Sometimes people are like, ‘Oh, like, I want to get pizza, or ‘I want to get a burger,’ or ‘I want Mexican food,’” Salguero says. “I want to hear people say, ‘Oh, I want to go grab Salvadoran food.’”

He also wants people in the Bay Area to know that there’s a lot more to Salvadoran food than pupusas: “I grew up on pupusas, so I love them. But then there’s these other foods that people don’t really know about and they’re not as popular, but they’re so good.”

Like Salguero, Vasquez wants to use her book and her platform to demonstrate the expansive diversity of Salvadoran food. “One of the things that I’ve always loved is, for instance, how many edible flowers there are in the cuisine — they’re so important,” she says.

Her favorite recipes in the book include rellenos de güisquiles (deep-fried chayotes stuffed with cheese), tortitas de camaron (patties made from corn masa and shrimp) and the SalviSour, a cocktail made with mango syrup and a Salvadoran spirit called Tic Tàck. She also includes a recipe for gallo en chicha, rooster cooked in a fermented pineapple juice — which happens to be one of Salguero’s favorite dishes on Popoca’s menu.

Ultimately, Salguero and Vasquez both use cooking to help younger generations of Salvadoran Americans connect with their heritage, though neither considers themselves an authority on the cuisine. Instead, they let their curiosity and love for the culture guide them.

“There is so much to learn, and I’ll never be able to learn all of it, and so I can just surrender to the fact that this is a journey,” Vasquez says.

On May 4, Vasquez will host a cooking demonstration (11 a.m.) and book signing (noon) at Book Passage (1 Ferry Building, San Francisco), and another book signing at 3 p.m. at Omnivore Books on Food (3885 Cesar Chavez St., San Francisco).

The SalviSoul Cookbook book launch and conversation with Javer Zamora will take place at Popoca (906 Washington St., Oakland) on May 5 at 6 p.m. Tickets are $57 and include a copy of the book, a pupusa and a cocktail.