A New Era for Latino Cookbooks

Within moments of Rick Bayless’ bespectacled, earnest face appearing on our TV screen each Saturday afternoon, my dad inevitably cursed the celebrity chef. 

“This motherfucker.” 

It wasn’t that Bayless’ Mexican food was bad. Actually, it was somehow worse that his food looked delicious—and even more enraging that Bayless’ PBS cooking show, Mexico: One Plate at a Time, avoided TexMex, the Tejano regional cuisine that is whitewashed fodder for school cafeteria “Taco Tuesdays” and “Cinco de Drinko” happy hours. Bayless endeavored to show the full depth and breadth of Mexican food.

How dare he.

My dad’s ire was multifaceted. As an immigrant from Mexico, he felt protective of Mexican food and he seemed quite certain that Bayless—a white man from Oklahoma—was “stealing” recipes from Mexican home cooks and thus, capitalizing on food that wasn’t his in more ways than one.

My dad also spent many years separated from his family while living as an undocumented immigrant in the U.S., precluding any risky cross-border trips. Once he naturalized through marriage to my mom, a white woman born and raised in California, money got in the way of visits home. The premise for most episodes of One Plate at a Time was that Bayless would take a trip somewhere in Mexico, followed by segments in his home kitchen in the U.S., where he demonstrated how to recreate dishes he consumed on his travels. 

No trauma related to migration. No poverty to contend with. My dad hated how accessible Mexico was to Bayless, and how inaccessible his home country was to our family. 

When One Plate a Time debuted on PBS in January 2000, it was a very different time in food media. Bayless was America’s best-known chef of Mexican food. Prior to his rise to fame, the person considered the leading authority on regional Mexican cuisine was British food writer Diana Kennedy. In the years since, many complicated conversations have publicly taken place about cultural appropriation and the outsized role that Mexican immigrants play in food systems and multicultural restaurant kitchens across the U.S.—a country that loves Mexican food and hates Mexican migrants. 

I’d like to think we’ve moved past the days in which it seems like a good idea to have culture vultures host cooking shows, though the food world remains a deeply imperfect place. The continued platforming of white tastemakers such as Alison Roman for their use of “new” and “exotic” ingredients—erasing the historical roots and people behind those ingredients—is just one example of the issues that continue to plague food media. It’s worth noting that the criticism of Bayless wasn’t just that he was a white man cooking Mexican food. 

It was the attitude on this motherfucker. 

Bayless was defensive and smug. He once infamously claimed that the pushback he received was essentially a form of reverse racism. He also strongly implied that a Mexican restaurant he consulted on would be the first to bring “the true flavors of Mexico” to Southern California, home to the largest Mexican population outside of Mexico. For every Bayless instance of white exceptionalism speaking for, and over, an entire culture, there are thousands more examples of white mediocrity crowding the culture out of its own kitchen.  

As a young writer and reporter interested in food writing, watching these conversations play out in the media left an indelible mark. In part, it’s why I embarked on an experiment in my 20s that eventually became standard operating practice. I decided I would only purchase cookbooks about specific cultures and communities if they were penned by a person from that culture or community. If it was a Korean cookbook, it had to be written by a Korean person, for example. My rule did not apply to cookbook authors of color writing about eurocentric cuisine. Not only were these books rare, but I do not believe you can appropriate what has been imposed on you. 

Early on, my rule for cookbooks proved to be a difficult decision that resulted in very few purchases. 

Once I started paying attention, it was fascinating to learn how cookbooks that weren’t eurocentric were relegated to “ethnic food” and even then, a majority of these cookbooks were written by white chefs, authors, and home cooks. This dynamic appeared especially prevalent for cookbooks about Mexican food and Asian cuisine—a tidy genre for wildly divergent food that spans many cultures, countries, and regions, though rest assured there’s a white man who views himself as an authority on it all. It seemed that the more of a presence a community had in the U.S., the harder the publishing world worked to convince white readers that other white people needed to narrowly explain these “foreign” cuisines to them. 

My earliest success finding cookbooks didn’t come by way of independent or chain bookstores, but rather thrift stores. This is where I made some of my earliest purchases of cookbooks by people such as Daisy Martinez, a Puerto Rican cook whose Daisy Cooks: Latin Flavors That Will Rock Your World was first published in 2006. Early on in my effort, cookbooks by Latino authors were prized possessions, but also lessons in how publishers exotified “Latino food” that wasn’t lowly, pedestrian Mexican food. In press materials for Daisy Cooks, readers were promised a book that goes beyond the “the pork, beans, rice, and burritos many people associate with Latino culture.”

More than 15 years have passed since I first vowed to embrace the simple theory that people of a particular culture are best positioned to teach us about their culture’s food. I now have an extensive cookbook library filled with hyper, hyper regional cookbooks. This includes gems such as Sandra A. Gutierrez’s groundbreaking The New Southern-Latino Table, the first of its kind to map the foodways of the South’s changing demographics. Another personal favorite is Guerrilla Tacos, a cookbook by Wes Avila that showcases his fine-dining influenced tacos born in Pico Rivera, CA. Located in Southeast Los Angeles, this region where Avila and I were born and raised is one often erased from the culinary map, making his cookbook a deeply meaningful contribution to food media. 

There are now so many gorgeous Mexican cookbooks by Mexican authors that if you still find yourself gravitating toward the Baylesses of the world, it’s intentional. But this isn’t true for a majority of Latinos in search of cookbooks that reflect their food and culture. Mexican authors and cooks now dominate the Latino cookbook category, leaving entire countries and diasporas with little to no culinary representation in food media. 

In the past year, I noticed a trend: Latino cookbooks expanded their cultural tastes and heritages. 

Bodega Bakes: Recipes for Sweets and Treats Inspired by My Corner Store by Afro-Dominican pastry chef Paola Velez, the cofounder of Bakers Against Racism, published in 2024 to great acclaim. "Yes, there's a lot of weight on my shoulders to represent and do all of this stuff—the Dominican Embassy has me on speed dial—but this is a new age of culinary,” she said in an Axios interview.

And then there is Salvadoreña Karla Tatiana Vasquez—no relation. More than a decade ago, Vasquez found herself on a similar quest to mine: She wanted to find Salvadoran recipes from Salvadoran people. No culinary conquistador had appropriated Salvadoran food, as evidenced by the lack of cookbooks Vasquez encountered.

For $10, she found a tiny recipe book written in Spanish on Amazon, though the book contained no pictures and was haphazardly compiled and difficult to follow. The only other cookbook Vasquez came across was Delicious El Salvador, self-published by Salvadoreña Alicia Maher. At the time, the book was sold out online and was selling on the secondary market for between $100 and $1,000. 

“I was looking for a beautiful, glossy book with a hardcover; something I could find at a bookstore in the cookbook section,” Vasquez told me. “Not being able to find that made me feel very vulnerable. As a Salvadoreña—especially in Los Angeles—there's always this narrative that Salvadorans are just another version of [people from] Mexico.” 

As a Mexican American also from Los Angeles—and one who read Vasquez’s book in one sitting—I know there are many beautiful and cutting overlaps between our cultures and our lives. But despite what you may have picked up from media depictions of Latinos, I can assure you that there is no singular Latino experience and we are indeed not interchangeable. 

Coming from food justice advocacy circles in L.A., Vasquez was from the school of thought that if something doesn’t exist, you build it. El Salvador’s complete lack of culinary representation in the food world fueled The SalviSoul Cookbook.

Published last year, it is the first U.S. cookbook focused on Salvadoran food from a major publishing house. It is also the kind of beautiful, glossy hardcover that cookbook dreams are made of.

“The impetus for this book was a lot of things, but one of them certainly has been combating that narrative that there's nothing in El Salvador; that it's just a copy of something else,” Vasquez said to The Flytrap. “Because nothing was out there to demonstrate the fallacy of that narrative. I felt like I needed to disrupt that belief because of how the women in my life lived. They never saw their food as being second best. This is what you ache for when you leave El Salvador: comida, the food—and how we do it and why we do it a certain way.”

SalviSoul isn’t a typical cookbook, and that is by design. Going into the more than 10-year process, Vasquez was firm in her decision not to put pupusas on the cover and not to give into the publishing industry’s impulse to place authors in “neat little boxes.”

“My experience as a Salvadoran hasn't been neat, so this book won't feel neat in that way,” Vasquez laughed.  

Storytelling is at the center of SalviSoul, and it’s just as much about Salvadoran food as it is the Salvadoreña matriarchs who hold the keys to these recipes and thus, serve as a lifeline to culture and history. Peppered throughout the book are beautiful photographs and short but complex profiles of the women whose recipes helped shape SalviSoul, detailing their histories with migration, complicated family dynamics, and their deep connections to food and cooking. In one, Vasquez writes about her grandmother Lucia’s deathbed wedding to her grandfather, a man she loved and who harmed her.

Lucia did not live to see the book come to fruition, though she was the first person to believe and understand Vasquez’s vision for SalviSoul. For this and many other reasons, celebrating the release of the book felt complicated, Vasquez explained. Some cookbook authors get to write a book about pickles because they love pickles. Others “have to expose the way our hearts beat,” she said. 

I can relate to the sentiment. Learning from my dad how to make my grandma’s arroz con pollo or mole from our family’s home state of Michoacán didn’t feel like fun cooking excursions. These moments in the kitchen felt weighty and loaded, like I was being tasked with safeguarding memories that were never mine but were now my responsibility to protect and carry on. 

Broadly, Vasquez describes the feeling of being the first Salvadoreña with a Salvadoran cookbook from a major American publisher in the year 2024 as a “sobering experience,” though one that she is grateful for. As the book continues to make its way through the world, she periodically receives reminders of how important SalviSoul is across the diaspora. 

She recently received an email from a Salvadoreño who, when deciding what kind of restaurant to open in Canada where he now lives with his family, opted for a sandwich shop because he assumed nobody would want Salvadoran food. He is far from home, he told Vasquez, and he struggles with how to teach his children about their culture and where they are from. 

“He said he bought my cookbook and he caught his daughter reading it on the couch. He said he imagined that to her, it felt like a fairy tale book because of all the stories and the way he watched her read through it,” Vasquez said, growing emotional. It struck a chord with the historian and cookbook author, who said she can still remember being a young person with a deep desire to feel rooted in her culture. 

“I can remember this anxiety and panic as a kid when we came from El Salvador,” Vasquez said. “I thought: There are so few people in my family here who know where we come from. If I lose them, how will I ever know where I’m from? So hearing these stories from people who feel comforted and affirmed by the book, it takes my breath away. It is the highest praise I can ever dream of.”

A motherfucker could never.  

This piece was edited by Christine Grimaldi and copy edited by s.e. smith.