<Imelda> I'm Imelda Golden.

One of the things that I really loved about Sandra's writing is, it feels like you're talking to a friend.

You're sitting down.

You're chit chatting with one of your girlfriends.

You're sharing recipes.

She's giving you the recipes, but she's also weaving in stories from her past and her upbringing, her living in Guatemala coming to the south, talks about her husband, and all of those things, but it's not just storytelling.

It's also the history.

She's able to mix in the history in a way that it's not hitting you over the head, but it's something like, "Oh, and this is why we do this."

<Holly> I'm Holly Jackson.

Join us as we bring you powerful stories from both new and established southern authors as we sit By The River.

♪ music ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Major funding for By The River is provided by the ETV Endowment of South Carolina.

For more than 40 years the ETV Endowment of South Carolina has been a partner of South Carolina ETV and South Carolina Public Radio.

Additional funding is provided by the USCB Center for the Arts, Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at USCB and the Pat Conroy Literary Center.

<Holly> Hi, it's another beautiful day here at our Waterfront Studio in Beaufort, South Carolina.

Thanks for joining us for By The River.

I'm your host Holly Jackson.

This season, we are focusing on unexpected southern stories and writers, and we are here today with the author of The New Southern Latino Table, Sandra Gutierrez.

Sandra, thank you so much for joining us, and it's something special about talking about a cookbook because they're not smelling.

They're not tasting.

We've got to bring this to life.

So, you're ready?

<Sandra> I'm ready.

<Holly> All right.

>> Thank you for having me.

Very, very nice.

<Holly> Absolutely.

So I was doing a little research and husband is behind the scenes, really in front of us right now.

I'm going to go ahead and give him a little shout out, because he kind of gave you that first nudge to get this thing going.

So let's back way up to that lunch break of his whenever he told you to just write something up kind of trying out for a job.

Get me started on that story, because it has to be told.

I love it.

<Sandra> We had just moved from Toronto, Canada to Cary, North Carolina.

The transition was rough from a very big city to a very small town, and I was getting very antsy, and he went on a lunch break and he came back and said to me, "Listen, the Cary News is looking for a food editor, food writer, and I think you can do it, I pretty much know you can do it.

You've got about 30 minutes to write an article, and I'll just drive by there and drop it off.

This was before email, before you know it's a long time ago, <Holly> Right.

>> And so I did.

I still remember the article I wrote.

It was on olive oil.

<Holly> Okay, so more questions about this in particular.

So it's this 30 minute period.

Have you ever written?

You're were a cook, but had you ever written about food before?

<Sandra> I had.

I was an English major so I had written.

I had written little things about food but never something that had been published, but I was a culinary instructor.

and so I thought, Well, I'm just going to teach a class on an easy subject olive oil for me easy at that point, and I just wrote the article, and he drove it by and two hours later, I got the call and they said, Where have you been?

I'm like, Who is this?

(Holly laughs) <Holly> That's incredible.

Wow.

Okay, so then you got that gig, which turned into what?

<Sandra> It turned into five columns in the whole foods section, I ended up doing the whole thing.

So interviewing a lot of celebrity authors, and doing a lot of ingredient based recipes and writing history and doing all these things.

But as I was writing that in 1996, I started receiving letters and calls from readers asking me about some Latin ingredients that were not usual back then.

Like, the first one that I remember being really big was chipotle peppers, <Holly> Okay.

>> They're like, Sandra, I heard about this ingredient, and I think I ate it in a sandwich in mayonnaise.

So I started you know, talking to people and because I was also trying to be more of a generalist writer at the beginning, I didn't have that confidence to start writing about southern food ways.

<Holly> Okay.

>> And the reason was very simple.

First week on the job and a caller called my editor and said, Why did you hire a Mexican editor for our newspaper?

<Holly> Oh!

>> I'm like, Ouch!

<Holly> Right, right.

>> Because I'm not Mexican.

(laughs) I'm not Mexican, I'm Guatemalan We do that distinction well, in Latin American.

Second of all, you know, I can write.

So, um, <Holly> So your self esteem in terms of writing was a little low in the beginning.

<Sandra> I better start as a generalist, and then become an expert in southern food ways before I start writing about southern food.

So I started studying southern food ways, and literally going to Nathalie Dupree's books, and Damon Lee Fowler and going back in history, going to the library, spending a lot of times and then asking my readers to invite me into their homes, to teach me, you know, so I learned from a grandmother how to make biscuits and I was invited to a lot of church suppers, and I learned all the recipes from the people who were inviting me to the church suppers.

and so slowly I started, you know, opening up my experience and my confidence to Southern cuisine, and when these phone calls started happening in 96, and continued happening over the years, I started realizing that we were onto something here something was happening to southern food ways, and I realized southern food ways is like a large tree with a lot of branches.

There's the Low country branch in southern food.

There is, you know, the Cajun branch, the Creole branch, and I was finding a new branch.

<Holly> That's beautiful.

I love that.

<Sandra> Like, this movement is happening.

I was invited to a party at a country club, with my husband, and there were Southerners, and when we walked in, they had instead of having a hog and barbecue, they had a pig roasted Cabrito, which is a goat, and they had served it with potato salad, deviled eggs, Cuban tostones, yellow rice, and they had this mishmash of Latin and southern ingredients, and that's the day it was 1997. that it clicked in me, and I said, okay.

This is something real.

It's everywhere.

Now, it's not only Latin Americans trying to find ingredients that suit their recipes, but also southerners who have all of a sudden started embracing Latin American ingredients, and cuisine and the culture, not only one culture, though.

This is not like the south-western movement where Mexican centric food ways has made it into southern food.

Tex Mex, for instance, or California cuisine.

This was something different.

and through the years, I started researching and investigating, and what I found was that all 21 Latin American countries, were starting to make an impact in southern food ways and that it wasn't chef centric.

This wasn't coming from chefs from restaurants doing fusion.

<Holly> Okay.

<Sandra> These were just regular people like you and me, <Holly> who were just travelers and really, okay.

<Sandra> and also people like me, I had grown up in Latin America, even though I was born here in the States.

So I was missing some of the flavors, you know.

<Holly> Right.

>> You know, hominy is exactly the same ingredient we use to make tamales.

We make masa out of hominy, We just call it different things.

So I was craving, you know, the hominy tamales.

<Holly> So you're having to use substitutes, right.

>> That kind of thing, but I realized I wasn't the only one.

and as more of us started moving into the South in the 1990s from different countries and at different economic levels, you had people working, of course, working the farms, but you had doctors, you had philosophers, you had people in the army.

You had all sorts of professionals also moving into the area and bringing their food ways and bringing their culinary traditions into the south.

and I had to ask, why.

Why is this happening?

Because it was happening, but then the question is why and how come this is happening now?

<Holly> Right.

<Sandra> So what I discovered was that at the base of our cuisines, if we look at Southern cuisine as a tree, and we look at Latin American cuisine as a tree as well, from those branches, you know, the trunks are made from exactly the same three cultures, and this is different from any other chain of territory in the world, from the south, all the way down to Brazil.

We share the three same cultures.

We share Native Americans, different branches, of course, different tribes, different groups.

Europeans, namely Iberians.

That's Spain and Portugal and Africans, which very few people have discovered or talked about the African veining Latin American food ways.

We know it here in the south.

But when you put those three groups, the same cooking techniques, because we share the same cooking techniques.

In fact, I hate to say it, my friends in the south, but barbacoa or barbecue was not invented in the South.

<Holly> Ooh....you know, some people just turned that TV off right now.

<Sandra> No.

Don't turn it off.

I like to say, we invented it.

You perfected it.

(laughs) No, it was invented, the word and the technique, by the Taino Indians in ancient, ancient Latin America in what is now the Dominican Republic.

and from there it started, you know, traveling, and it was the Africans who started becoming the experts in this way of cooking and brought it to the south, and so there are different kinds of barbecue in the South than there is in Latin America, but the idea of cooking meat on the spit over the fire is something that's ancient, and so all those little things started piquing my interest, and then I discovered we have the same basket of ingredients, chocolate, nuts, pork, pork and lard, of course.

<Holly> Right, right.

<Sandra> Corn, the three sisters, corn, peas, or beans, and squash, and I realized, you know, you put them all together, and that's what's happening.

We're just all mixing and coming together into the same territory, and starting to create our own dishes and adopting and adapting what the others have, and there's this new cuisine coming.

<Holly> Well, whenever I was going to talk about the book, one thing I was going to say is point out the research that you did, because there are stories along the way, but hearing you tell these stories, I can tell that the research is part of the fun for you.

So, tell me when that began and just kind of how you got into it, because I can tell when you're talking to me, this is something you're passionate about.

<Sandra> You know, right.

I've read historical cookbooks.

There's a lot of history and trivia in my books, and the reason I think is, I feel like a detective.

I'm always asking the question, why do we eat what we eat?

To me, it's like a mystery that I have to solve, and I never know where it's going to take me.

And yes, I love to research to the point that I've got to stop my research at some point before I start writing the book, because I could just stay in research mode.

<Holly> Right, right.

<Sandra> I love it.

I'm a very curious person.

So you know, I love to collect boxes and baskets, and try to imagine what somebody put in those boxes and baskets before.

<Holly> That's neat.

>> and I think that translates into my questions and my quest for answers when it comes to cooking and food.

Because we can understand each other so much better when we know what we eat.

Cultures understand each other more through food than they do through anything else.

It's a safe place for us to discover differences or discuss differences.

<Holly> Right.

>> With each other.

<Holly> That's true.

>> Most of us love to eat, you know, and I think it was <Holly> - We got to eat.

<Sandra> Yeah.

We've gotta eat!

It's just a very good way of starting a bridge between people.

So I think between those two, my love of bringing people together and my eternal curiosity to find out why things happen.

I found that a good, a good mix.

<Holly> I think you did.

Tell me about just, you're not a trained chef, but you are trained by family members.

Tell me how you became to be that one who knew that secret about the biscuits and that sort of thing.

Talk about how it all began.

<Sandra> So it all begins when I'm a little girl.

and I live in Guatemala, you know, with a grandmother who was a socialite.

She had all these parties.

She was very famous.

She was a Martha Stewart of her age, without the fame.

<Holly> Right, right.

<Sandra> But the tablescapes and all these things and you never knew who was going to be in her house, politicians, sometimes priests.

I mean, you never really knew, and I was very shy.

So I would hide in the kitchen.

and her staff - she had a big kitchen staff, would say you can only be here if you do something.

So I started cooking, since I was about five or six years old, and of course, I grew to love it, and I - that curiosity, why are you doing that?

Why are you mixing that?

Or can I do that too, and one of my aunts, a great aunt of mine was a very famous caterer and she also wrote a social column on the newspapers way back when newspapers had social columns, such and such is looking for a job.

<Holly> Oh, yeah.

Right.

<Sandra> So she, it was funny, because she would cater this very famous parties, very great parties, and while she was there, she would get all the gossip to write into the social columns.

So, it was a perfect job.

But she didn't teach me the gossiping part, but she taught me the French cuisine and all the basics of cooking, and so that's when I started, I never stopped.

I never stopped learning to this day.

I've never stopped learning, and I like to say I'm a cook, who writes for cooks.

So I'm not a chef.

I don't write or cook like a chef.

I have a very busy life.

I get home at the same time you get home.

I have 30 minutes an hour to cook and make dinner for the family.

So I have to come up with practical ways of cooking.

<Holly> And that's good because you're relatable to the people who are reading and cooking.

You know, people who cook tend to say that whenever they're cooking it's therapeutic, and then so many of the authors also bring up that word whenever I'm talking to them whenever they're writing, it's therapy for them.

So you've kind of, do you have two therapies and which one wins over?

Which one gives you the most, I guess, stress relief and satisfaction?

<Sandra> That's a very interesting question.

No one's asked me that before.

I would say that writing for me is something that I have to do, because I must share the knowledge and it's a much easier way to communicate the knowledge.

Cooking for me is a pleasure.

It really is a pleasure.

I can get lost in that.

I say I like to entertain because it's entertaining for me.

I'm entertained doing it, but it's a mixture of both.

I think it depends on the day.

The one thing I will tell you is that they're both very creative things, and it's a pity that all of us have to cook everyday to eat, because I know there's so many people who don't like it, and so I tried to make recipes and to put the recipes and explain them and write them in a way in which they will work for whoever's picking up the book, whether they're advanced, or novices in a way that the recipe will work.

>> Okay.

<Sandra> because I think a lot - being a culinary instructor, and again, I teach regular people to cook and I have been for 30 years, having people come to me and say, I can't cook, and I normally say yes you can.

No.

<Holly> What do you think that is?

You know, when people say that, is it just that something went wrong one time and they haven't gotten over it?

Or what?

<Sandra> I think that a lot of recipes that people pick up on, especially now via internet haven't been tested.

So it's easy to write a recipe, you know, but it's not easy to communicate exactly how to do it, or how to test it so that what works for me works for you, and so what I tell them is, you need a new cookbook, not mine necessarily.

You just need a good recipe.

Everybody can cook, because if you can read, you can cook, but maybe the recipe is the one that's failing you.

You're not failing the recipe.

<Holly> Very good.

<Sandra> So that's important to take that fear away and that mystery away from cooking.

<Holly> I love that.

Let's go a little bit more into the book and tell me what the reader will take away.

Obviously, recipes, but how would you describe the recipes within it?

<Sandra> So the way that I tackled this book was when the University of North Carolina Press asked me to write a whole book on the subject It was now I had proven that the movement was real.

It was how do I describe a movement?

And how do I make it real to the everyday cook, without making it so- How do you say it?

Didactic, that people are not going to come and embrace it.

The answer are the recipes.

So the recipes are important in the book, I tackle them in the following way.

I said, what if a southern cook were to meet a Latino Cook, and together were to create a dish with the same ingredients that reflected both cuisines and then we presented them to both families at the table.

These recipes need to be recipes that when you see it, and I see it, we both recognize the dish and say, Oh, that's a chowder.

That's a she crab chowder, and maybe I'll say no, that's Belizean Tapado you know, which is another seafood dish, and then combine the ingredients and find out the differences.

For instance, instead of crab, using different kinds of seafood instead of a roux, using coconut milk to thicken it.

<Holly> Oh!

<Sandra> But they both look the same, and when you taste them, you both get that.

Oh, I know this.

<Holly> There's different about this.

>> But with a twist.

<Holly> Right.

<Sandra> So that's how I tackled each recipe.

<Holly> Okay, what are standout recipes that people- that you get the most feedback on within the book?

<Sandra> So the first one, I think that people are surprised with is the fried chicken.

<Holly> Okay.

<Sandra> Because it's a fried chicken that is marinated in buttermilk, like southerners do, but there's cilantro in the marinade, and there are other spices in the marinade, and then it's cooked differently.

It's actually pan fried for the beginning of the recipe until you get that beautiful crust, and then you transfer it to the oven, and you finish it there, and what you get at the end is very, very crispy crust with a very moist interior, the kind of chicken that you can take to picnics, and it will get soggy.

That's the kind of thing.

The other thing that surprised people was the tomato cobbler, a sweet, a dessert that I made with cherry tomatoes, and when people first taste it they swear they're cherries, but they are cherry tomatoes.

<Holly> Are we talking just like you would do a peach cobbler but you're doing cherry tomatoes?

<Sandra> You make like a jam or a preserve with the tomatoes first.

They're easy and that's what you pour into the pie, and then you cover it with the crust and it's why wouldn't you?

Tomatoes are fruits just like peaches are fruits.

So, we eat a lot of sweets.

<Holly> It's hard to convince them of us that, just because of the taste and we always group them with vegetables, but <Sandra> Exactly things like that that I think people are surprised.

I have a recipe for a rolled cake.

Do you know most you know I'm sure you know, most of us who have ever been invited to luncheons or bridal showers are given those little potato buns that are filled with ham and cheese.

<Holly> Oh yes.

<Sandra> Have mustard with poppy seeds So I made it into an Argentinean rolled cake, and so it looks like a rolled cake, but when you cut into it, you've got this ham salad inside of the same flavor profile when you're eating it.

It's as if you're eating one of those sandwiches, but in cake form and for some reason men love that recipe.

It's been very popular with men.

<Holly> Okay.

>> So I have a lot of recipes that are like that are, but easy, easy ones that also made that now are very common, but were not common when I wrote the book is a peach salsa.

Wherever you go now - <Holly> I see that a lot now.

<Sandra> Salsa, right?

<Holly> Right, right.

<Sandra> But when I wrote about it, people weren't familiar with that you can make pico de gallo with peaches, you know.

I have an avocado soup that's very reminiscent of the buttermilk cold soups that you have here in the summer, but I am, you know, here we serve them with a shrimp salad, but I serve them with a nacho that's topped with that shrimp salad, and so the variations come very subtly in both cuisines and they go back and forth, depending on what I'm dealing with.

I also have a tamale recipe, of course, made with collard greens.

<Holly> Oh, okay!

>> because I couldn't find the leaves - <Holly> You can find those here, collard greens.

>> And they taste great.

<Holly> Yeah.

>> So those are the kinds of recipes.

They're not far-fetched.

They're not fused.

They're what I call natural combinations of the same ingredients we would use but just flavored differently or spiced differently, and not all the food is spicy, because in Latin America, not all the food is spicy, and just interesting takes on dishes, but everyday dishes.

<Holly> Let's talk about the emotional aspect of these dishes, because I mean, even when you were just telling the story about those ham sandwiches, suddenly I've got this whole story spinning in my head of you know, when at a small church that grew up in South Carolina, someone would have an event.

That's always what was served, I can all of a sudden think about the lady who made them.

She was a local.

All these memories start coming back.

How beautiful it must be whenever your readers talk about those kinds of stories, and it must be the same for you because of the memories you have with your family.

<Sandra> It is for me, because I've been in the south the most part of my life.

I've been here over 30 years.

So I am a new southern Latina person, but my children are too and now my granddaughter, you know, they - So for me, that part is special.

But I'll tell you a story of a moment that really, really blew my mind and it touched me touches me to this day.

I still get goose bumps.

When I had a party at my house and served only new southern Latino food from my book, there was a gentleman who tried my corn ice cream with hot praline sauce, and the moment he put that spoon in his mouth, he started crying, and we were all like, are you okay?

and he said, he calmed down, and he said, you have no idea what this reminded me of.

He said it reminded me of walking, holding my dad's hand down that street fair, in my local community when I was little, maybe four or five, eating caramel corn.

<Holly> Right.

>> And I get that a lot from the recipes, because I think there's soul in food.

There is love in food.

There are all these emotions that I tied to food.

That's why things like comfort food exist, right?

<Holly> It's a real thing.

<Sandra> It is a real thing, and so when I was putting this book together, that yearning of bringing people closer together, instead of creating a new cuisine, because I didn't create it.

I just discovered it, I happen to be in the right place at the right time, you know, to find that it was happening already, and just gave it a name and put it down on the plate, but it was important for me that they were recipes that brought those kinds of good, kind, loving, important feelings in people.

So that when they sat together at the table, that is the point of communication.

You can really appreciate people's differences, and agree to disagree if you have a point of communication first, and that's the heart.

Because once you like each other.

Once you get away from that you're a stranger, and I'm a stranger, then we can talk about lots of things, and even if we agree to disagree, we are having that communication.

That was important to me.

That's the reason I wrote the book.

It's so that people can come together at the table and start conversations because the world is changing.

The world has changed, but the world has always been in flux.

Immigrants have come and gone forever.

This is not anything new.

It's new for the South, since the 1990s for this part of the South, but not for Florida.

Not for Texas.

>> Right.

<Sandra> Not for California, but this area of the South and so it was important for me to say, you know, we may look like strangers, but we have a lot more in common than we think.

<Holly> Just give it a try.

Very good.

Unfortunately, we have to wrap up.

I would love to talk about this more, and you know, this is really something beautiful because I never thought that I'd almost cry talking about a cookbook, but we did, and it just goes to show how much love you've put into it.

So my mom always says that I can tell that this dish was cooked with love, and I can tell that this book was The New Southern Latino Table.

Thank you for joining us here on By The River.

I'm your host, Holly Jackson, and we hope to see you back here real soon.

<Sandra> Born in the United States, to Latin American parents, I moved at a young age with my family to Guatemala, my parents' homeland, and was instantly immersed in a world of melded cultures.

My first words I'm told were in English, and I grew up as a student in an American school in the middle of Guatemala City.

I learned the words to two national anthems, the pledges of allegiance to the US flag and the Guatemalan flag and the histories of two different cultures.

Our school cafeteria was as likely to serve hamburgers and tuna salad one day as it was to offer melanesas and panes con frijoles the next.

Brownies and donuts shared the dessert counter with arroz con leche and buñuelos ♪ music ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Major funding for By the River is provided by the ETV Endowment of South Carolina for more than 40 years.

The ETV Endowment of South Carolina has been a partner of South Carolina ETV and South Carolina Public Radio.

Additional funding is provided by the USCB Center for the Arts Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at USCB and the Pat Conroy Literary Center.

♪