Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. The interview we've got for you today

offers an inside peek into what it takes to get a cookbook made, what you have to prove, and who you

have to convince in order to get a publisher to bite. The book is called the Salvi-Sole

cookbook by Carla Tatiana Vasquez, who writes about Salvadoran food,

which, for reasons she'll get into in the interview, isn't a hot commodity in the cookbook market?

But in this interview with M.Pier's A. Martina, she says that she's doing all of this,

jumping through all of these hoops, not for the blessings of a fancy pants publisher,

but to preserve the work

of Salvadoran women that cooked up these recipes.

That's ahead.

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About a decade ago, Carla Tatiana Vasquez was trying to learn how to make her favorite dish called Salpikong Salvadoranio.

It's a beef salad with radishes, mint, lime, and salt.

Carla was born in El Salvador, moved to Los Angeles as an infant and grew up eating Salvadoran food,

which made her think it'd be easy to find some recipes.

I went to the internet and I did a Google search, and I found two books, which I thought

immediately, I was like, wow, this is absurd, though.

Absurd because there are more than two and a half million Salvadorinos living in the U.S.

...