Taco Pizza with Refried Beans and Ground Beef. Rey Lopez/photo; Lisa Cherkasky/food styling, for The Washington Post Marisel Salazar is on a mission to improve our understanding of American Latino food. “This isn’t a Latin American cookbook,” the food writer and on-camera host wrote in the introduction to her debut cookbook, “Latin-ish.
” “It’s a collection of dishes that people who came or whose families came from those countries to America eat here now.” Much of the country is already familiar with Tex-Mex cuisine, such as fajitas and queso, but Salazar goes on to survey “the history and recipes of American Latino cuisines as a full gastronomic ecosystem,” she wrote, which also includes Southwest, Cal-Mex, Florribbean, Latino Southern, New York Latino and Midwest Latino cuisines. Taken in their entirety, “these are foods that have naturally and over time evolved into what we see now on our plate,” Salazar said on a video call from her apartment in New York.
The impetus for writing “Latin-ish” came from “a place of being indignant,” she said. While she was attending an event and enjoying a Tex-Mex dish, one of the other guests commented that it wasn’t real, authentic Mexican food. “It really just posed the question in my mind, like, how can people not see the difference between what is traditional Latin American food and what to me was clearly American Latino cuisine?” Salazar recalled.
For Salazar, the distinction had always been clear �.
