This interview is brought to you by the SAVEUR Cookbook Club, our passionate community of food-loving readers from around the globe, celebrating our favorite authors and recipes. Join us as we cook through some of the latest cookbooks, and share your food pics and vids on social media with the hashtags #SAVEURCookbookClub and #EatTheWorld.

Jessica Carbone: How did the idea for this cookbook come to you?

Kiera Wright-Ruiz: This book started just because I’m alive. I used to work at the New York Times as a social editor, and while I was there, I started doing some recipe development. It was just after Priya Krishna’s Indian-ish had come out, and she made space for a lot of people to tell their first-generation American stories in a different way. Priya was one of the first people I talked to about this idea, and I said, “Why is there not a Latin American version of this?” Latin American culture is covered so infrequently, in food media or elsewhere, or if it is portrayed, it’s so limited. That was one of the reasons I wanted to write this book, because growing up, I never saw myself in the “Latina” stereotype. I was like, “I am nothing like that—I don’t look like that, I don’t sound like that, I don’t even speak Spanish. So how do I fit?”

Right now, there are first-generation stories being told in cookbooks, but often they’re told through the lens of one person being fully one ethnicity, and we tend to showcase the lowest common denominator story of what that means. I often think about the “lunchbox” trope, where people feel uncomfortable with their parents’ immigrant food in their lunchbox. Those experiences are very important, and I can’t tell my story without those stories, but I also couldn’t really see myself in them because I am two minority groups, and I didn’t even have my parents to [pack my lunchbox]. My story is so nontraditional and nonlinear, and it showcases different elements that we haven’t really touched upon in food media. Whether that means socioeconomic diversity, location diversity, what it means when your parents aren’t in the picture—these things are real for a lot of people that are just not explored in this medium. So I’m hoping that my book can change that.

You say this a book not of passed-down wisdom but a kind of “culinary genealogy.” What’s an example of your culinary genealogy, and how did recipes come out of that?

When I first thought about this book, I said, “Let me just sit down for 30 minutes and spew out every recipe I could think of,” and suddenly I had 80 recipes. So I really started with the food because so much of my life has been shaped by food memories; they’re how I put little pins in where I’ve been. Once I had the recipes, I needed a narrative that was clear for the reader, and going chronologically made the most sense. So it starts with me-then—mostly Ecuadorian recipes—and ends with me-now, which felt like a nice way to put culinary spotlights on people who have had such an influence on me. For example, my grandma is my grandma in terms of our relationship. Biologically, she is my step-grandma—we are not related by blood, she is fully Mexican, and I am not Mexican at all. But she has a whole chapter dedicated to her because she was one of my first caretakers and has had a huge influence on my life. I grew up with a lot of Mexican influence and culture, including going to Mexico and visiting her family—things I’ve never done for the biological Ecuadorian side of my family—and eating lots of Mexican food. As unique as I felt growing up and how alone that made me feel, I had shared experiences with so many people, even if they’re not my blood.

Get the recipe >

You wrote a whole love letter to plantains, which are so important to your grandfather. What do plantains mean to you now that you’re based in Japan?

If I see plantains now, I buy and freeze as many as I can. I felt their absence before, when I moved to Hawai‘i for a year and was so far away from everything I knew. And then, of course, I moved even further away. But when I eat plantains now, I just feel so much joy and peace because they’re so comforting—not just in the normal sense of “this is comfort food,” but I feel this kind of stillness within myself, knowing that I know how everything works, even for a moment. Living in Tokyo, I often don’t know what’s going on for a lot of reasons, and so if I can find plantains, the payoff is even greater because it really provides that feeling of calm.

How did you decide that there were going to be illustrations in the book?

Often if you look across the Latin American cookbook section, there’s sort of a visual repetitiveness, and I just wanted to crush it up into a ball and make something totally different that no one would expect. In the beginning I thought, “What if we had no photos?” And then, of course, my editor was like, “No.” But I love illustration—that was one of the reasons my first book was a picture book. The illustrator I worked with, Zyan Méndez, lives in Mexico, and I reached out to her because I love her zine-like aesthetic. I wanted to put sparkles in people’s eyes and give plantains faces and make little sassy empanadas—to really challenge people from a visual standpoint on what Latin American food should look like. That said, I’m really grateful that there are photos. Lauren [Vied Allen, the book’s photographer] did such an amazing job of pairing the narrative of my personal stories with Zyan’s playful illustrations, and she brought such life and playfulness into the photography.

Get the recipe >

Though your book spans Latin America, are there common ingredients across these cuisines?

Latin America is such a huge place with many countries inside of it. Even Ecuador, which is a small country, has an extreme amount of diversity in its landscape—whether that’s the Andes Mountains, thousands and thousands of square meters above sea level, or the Galápagos Islands, which are literally in the sea. My family is from Guayaquil, a beachy part of Ecuador, so that’s why my grandpa’s obsessed with crabs and seafood. But for someone else, Ecuadorian food means potatoes dug up in the mountains—there’s no one cuisine. Even so, there are a few things that were common across my family members. Achiote is a commonly used ingredient, also called annatto in English. In Ecuador, the achiote seeds are usually fried in oil to create a natural coloring base, and they have a very subtle earthy flavor. But when my family moved to the U.S., they started to use sazon, which has crushed achiote seeds in it, because it was just readily available at most grocery stores. Sazon is a celebrated ingredient amongst many kinds of Latin American pantries, but definitely not all.

When you were putting together the recipes for this, how much did you collaborate with family members?

I worked closely with my family on their respective chapters. For my aunt TT’s chapter, the recipes are straight-up hers! (Though the pernil uses both our techniques.) For some of my grandma’s recipes, I added my own spin; I wanted to add pineapple salsa to her fried fish, and she first thought I was crazy but eventually tried it and said it was pretty tasty! Like a lot of home cooks, they’re not measuring specific ingredients, they’re just cooking from the hip because this is what they’ve been cooking their whole lives. So I came back from Tokyo to cook with them for a week each, nonstop cooking every day to get those recipes. Specifically with my grandma, I’ve seen her cook so many times, but it was always sort of happening in the background for me until I finally paid attention, and I’m really glad I did.

Though your foster mother was the person behind a whole chapter of recipes, including the book’s arroz con pollo, you didn’t reconnect with her for the book. What did you do when you couldn’t talk to the creator of the dish?

A lot of that chapter was shaped by taste memory because I vividly remember certain things that my foster mother used to do. But I don’t view that as a particularly happy chapter in my life or in the book because it’s more melancholy. I thought about how to show the absence of a person through the chapter art, so I worked closely with Zyan to create more of a soft glow to things, to show this kitchen as overgrown with vines, as a symbol of how it was sort of lost to time. I also use that chapter to show that not all food needs to be happy for it to matter. A lot of these dishes made an impact on me because, in a time when I had no control of what was going on, these bright flavors were something that brought me momentary joy and nourishment.

Get the recipe >

You still make plenty of Latin food even in Tokyo, creating original dishes like the elote taquitos (which replicates the flavors of Mexican street corn). What’s your process for developing Latin American recipes now that you’re in Japan?

The grocery stores in Japan are so much more seasonal than the U.S. You can’t get fresh corn here unless it’s summer, so when it’s corn season, I go all in, and all the restaurants around me do, too. That’s inspired me a lot because it makes me think more on my feet. But this is also the first time I’ve had a Costco membership, so I can get some American ingredients. And I haven’t had to entirely change how I cook because some of the recipes I grew up with are made with fresh ingredients that are everywhere. Shrimp ceviche is a great example—I can get cilantro, lime, shrimp, and onions literally anywhere in the world, so I can recreate that dish no matter where I am. But I’m also very familiar with the one Latin American grocery store in Tokyo.

I’ve never felt more American than I have living in Japan, and I mean that in all the good ways and bad—from the volume at which I speak to literally what I think is right and wrong. Growing up in the U.S., I didn’t always feel American, and that was one of the reasons I wanted to leave. Coming here, I’ve realized that I’m 1,000 percent American, and everything about who I am reflects the culture and country I’m from. Living here as an immigrant, I’m also hyper-aware of how my experience mirrors that of my family. They moved to the U.S. with very little money—and in my grandpa’s case, with a bunch of children—so I have more privilege, but we all had to deal with the language barrier and the mountains of documents required for immigrants. It’s important to talk about the coming-to-America story because there isn’t just one. Immigrants have a million different stories to share.

What attitude do you hope the reader will bring to your book?

That they approach it with openness and a sense of hunger—not just for the food. Of course, I want them to think that the food is delicious, because it is, but I want them to approach it with a hunger that speaks to who they are. At one point in the editing process, I wrote something about how being a certain ethnicity makes people curious about it, and then an editor told me, “That might not be everyone’s experience.” I was shocked and thought, “Why wouldn’t someone want to know more about their background?” To me, that’s what I’ve been doing my whole life, learning more about my culture. So I hope it does spark that kind of curiosity, of someone wanting to look through their own culinary past.