Party All the Time Sandwiches

by Laurie Woolever

Back when I was a problem drinker and pothead, I loved parties, which offered a chance to drink a lot for free and messily eat ill-advised quantities of crispy, fatty, salty and / or sugary foods. Now, sober, I spend the days before a party in a state of lazy anxiety, wondering whether I can credibly tell the host that I might have Covid so that I can stay home and watch awful people at parties on TV. 

A few weeks ago, I overcame my lassitude to attend a party for Marisel Salazar’s debut cookbook, Latin-ish: More Than 100 Recipes Celebrating American Latino Cuisines. Salazar’s heritage is Cuban, Peruvian, and Panamanian. She was born in Panama and then, as part of a military family, she lived in Hawaii, Japan, Virginia, New York, and Madrid, all before the age of 21. 

Moving between cultures, re-imagining family recipes using creative substitutes, and tasting new things in new places gave Salazar a particularly broad perspective on American, Latin American, and American Latino cooking. An encounter with a food snob who denigrated Tex-Mex cuisine as “inauthentic” was the jumping off point for the book, in which she gently, joyfully dismantles the notion of “authenticity” as applied to cuisines that have been shaped by centuries of war, diaspora, colonialism, immigration, and innovation. From the book’s introduction:

It can feel tempting to romanticize the past, to embrace the belief that older or more traditional means better or more authentic. Some of us fantasize about how our ancestors or predecessors ate, ignoring or repressing that, over time, food changes for lots of reasons ... recipes change because, over time, locations, circumstances, ingredients and people change. That's how food culture evolves, and I love it.