Sandra Gutierrez celebrates Latin American cookings glorious diversity

CARY, N.C. — “I literally broke my neck while writing this book,” Sandra Gutierrez says while serving me from a basket of pupusas she just made on her griddle. The cooking instructor, food historian and cookbook author’s latest book, “Latinísimo: Home Recipes from the Twenty-One Countries of Latin America,” is the culmination of her life’s work.

“I had this terrible pain in my neck the week after we finished our photo shoot. This was the spring of 2021. Everybody kept saying, all my doctors kept saying, ‘It’s stress — you’ve been writing this huge book. It will go away,’” Gutierrez recounts, noting that she didn’t have an accident or other serious incident that could have caused an injury. A few weeks later, when pain started shooting down into her fingers and toes, a doctor finally suggested an MRI. There it was: a fracture in her cervical spine. Doctors weren’t sure how it happened and didn’t know how she was still standing or even alive. Gutierrez was rushed into an operating room for emergency surgery.

When she woke up the next day, she was paralyzed from the neck down.

“It was scary,” says Gutierrez, 58. “But I’m tenacious. When my doctor came in to tell me that they didn’t know if I would be able to walk again, I said, ‘Oh, you don’t know me. I have work to do. I have this book that I need to finish before I die.’”

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After several weeks in the intensive care unit, she was transferred to a rehab center. There, she relearned all sorts of basic movements: bending her knees, extending her arms, getting up, walking, writing, typing. Her physical therapists kept adding new activities to her days, testing her mental and physical limits. One day, they asked her what she most wanted to do. “I said, ‘I need to cook, I miss cooking,’” Gutierrez says, smiling at the memory. A kitchen was set up, ingredients were purchased. Using a walker for support, she moved around the space before starting to chop. “I made an entire Cuban meal — picadillo, yellow rice, tostones — for all 12 of the physical therapists,” she recalls. After dinner, and a round of applause, they told her she could go home.

“It was a very, very humbling experience,” she says now. “But the book, my mission in writing it — to celebrate the diversity of Latin American food, to preserve our home recipes, to pave the way for other writers from Latin America — saved my life.”

Sandra Alfaro Samayoa, whose family hails from Guatemala, was born in Philadelphia where her father, then a general dentist, was getting his specialization in maxillofacial and oral surgery at the University of Pennsylvania. He went on to do his residency at Yale University, so as a toddler, she also lived in New Haven, Conn.

Though Yale tried to hire Ramiro Alfaro Arellano, he declined. “They had offered him the job of a lifetime. But he said, ‘No, I have to go back. I have to go back and build my country,’” Gutierrez says.

Shortly thereafter, he started his own practice in Guatemala City, which he ran until his death in 2017. He also founded the School of Dentistry — “one of the most respected dental schools in the world,” Gutierrez says — at the Universidad Francisco Marroquín with a group of friends and colleagues.

“When I told my father I wanted to be a writer — I was maybe 11 years old? He looked at me and he said, ‘You’re going to starve!’” Gutierrez says. “I joked with him later that that’s why I became a food writer.”

As a child, determined to fulfill her dream, Gutierrez filled notebooks with poetry and stories. But she was surrounded by food. She remembers picking recently fallen avocados off the ground, peeling off a bit of the flesh, sprinkling it with sea salt “that I carried with me specially in a plastic bag” and squeezing the creamy green fruit right into her mouth.

Meanwhile, her family was educating her palate “one bite at a time,” she writes in “Latinísimo.” Her parents loved to travel and were very social. The family had friends throughout Latin America and “felt as comfortable eating in a Parisian bistro as they did in a Mexican cantina.”

Gutierrez spent many weekends with her grandmother, Roksanda Serovic de Prem, whose estate, which still stands at the edge of Guatemala City, encompassed an organic farm full of fruits, vegetables, cattle, poultry and pigs. “Long before entertaining became a trend, [de Prem] was famous for her parties (some casual and some elaborate), showstopping tablescapes, and majestic flower arrangements,” Gutierrez writes. “We never knew how many people would be there. But my grandmother always fed everyone well. If more friends or family arrived at the last minute, she always had a plan. She knew how to stretch a single chicken to feed 24 guests!” Gutierrez says, noting that de Prem made sure Gutierrez learned her recipes — around a dozen of them made it into “Latinísimo.”

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The education she received at home — homestyle cooking, entertaining, making social connections, a passion for learning — would become as important to Gutierrez’s future as her primary education at the American School of Guatemala. But it was at school that she met the man who would become her husband, Luis Gutierrez. They began dating in 1981. In 1983, she enrolled at Smith College and moved to Massachusetts. When Luis got a job in Toronto, she joined him there in 1987. In Toronto, she connected with other avid cooks, offered catering services to neighbors and taught cooking classes at a nearby church.

In 1994, when Luis got a job in Raleigh, N.C., they moved into a house in Cary. That’s where they would raise their two daughters. Back then, the town’s population was around 40,000. (It’s now closer to 180,000.) “We were clearly the only Latin Americans in the area at the time,” Gutierrez tells me.

Five months into living in Cary, Gutierrez missed the busy life she had made for herself in Toronto. “I was bored to death. One day my husband walked into the house, plopped the Cary newspaper on the table and said, ‘They’re looking for a food editor. Apply for the job. You’re driving me crazy,’” Gutierrez says with a laugh.

This was well before everyone had email, so she typed up an article on olive oil and attached her résumé. Luis drove the application over to the newspaper’s office. “The editor called me that afternoon to offer me the job,” Gutierrez says, noting that she took to the job immediately. Later that year, Gutierrez started teaching cooking classes in her home kitchen. “I’d put the word out to neighbors, people at the grocery store, whoever,” she says. Eventually, she would teach at culinary schools across the country, including the Miami Culinary Institute, Lake Austin Spa Resort and the Cook’s Warehouse in Atlanta. “I like to say I’ve taught chefs, but I’m not a chef. I am and will always be a home cook,” she says.

Though Gutierrez can cook all sorts of cuisines and enjoys flavors from around the world, her heart is with the 21 countries of Latin America. Beginning in the mid-1990s, as she built a career as a food writer and cooking instructor, she became an expert and scholar on the multifarious cuisines of South and Central America and the Caribbean. “For at least 20 years, in the back of my mind, I was thinking of how to write the book on Latin American food,” Gutierrez says.

In 1996, Gutierrez started to notice how a new wave of Latino immigrants to the American South were adapting their recipes to use local ingredients and influencing all sorts of cooks to add chiles, cumin, avocados and more to their dishes. She called it the Southern-Latino culinary movement, and in 2011, the University of North Carolina Press published her first book, “The New Southern-Latino Table.”

Two years later, she wrote, “Latin American Street Food,” a cookbook that also traces the explosion in popularity of streetside taco, pupusa, arepa and ceviche stands and trucks. “Street food is a great unifying force in Latin America, with the businessmen eating next to the construction worker next to the babysitter next to the teacher,” Gutierrez says. “But it was also finally a way for women to assert their independence, to start their own businesses.”

In 2015, Gutierrez published her third and fourth books, “Empanadas” and “Beans and Field Peas.” During the fraught political years that followed, “I wondered if I would have the opportunity to write the definitive book on Latin American home cooking, because I kept finding that publishing houses were not open to it, not ready for it. So I started to think that my job was actually just to pave the way for the next generation of Latin American food writers,” she says.

Meanwhile, Gutierrez’s influence continued to expand. Her first tortilla press was exhibited at the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum in 2016. Her comal is part of the permanent FOOD: Transforming the American Table exhibit at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

In 2017, she decided to put her ideas for a comprehensive book about Latin American cuisine on paper. She began traveling to Latin America, visiting libraries and universities with cookbook collections, speaking with family friends and approaching home cooks at grocery stores and markets.

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Over time, she assembled a collection of thousands of community and family cookbooks and recipes — a trove of research material that would feed into her book proposal. “The recipe list in my first proposal — which is the list of possible recipes that can make it into a book — was 9,000 recipes long,” Gutierrez says, noting that she wanted to be exhaustive so that publishers could tell that she knew what she was talking about. Friends and colleagues provided encouragement.

“I was there at her home, in her library, when Sandra was working on the book,” says Toni Tipton-Martin, award-winning cookbook author and editor in chief for Cook’s Country magazine. “I saw how she organized her material, how disciplined she was. I also saw her get the same kind of pushback I was getting. The publishing industry only wanted books about tacos. But I watched her dig in and stay faithful to the story she wanted to tell.”

Eventually, in 2019, an editor at Knopf saw Gutierrez’s vision. “Latinísimo” — the name was chosen because it means “very Latin American” — would be a book of recipes made today by home cooks — not restaurant recipes, not special occasion banquet recipes. In the end, 357 recipes, plus many variations, made it into the final text. Photographs were shot in Gutierrez’s home by a photographer she chose, Kevin J. Miyazaki. “It was important to me that the book be published simultaneously in English and Spanish,” Gutierrez says.

Gutierrez left the Cary News in 2004, but continued to write for other outlets — in between writing books — until 2019, when she shifted her focus. Her plan was to kick off a new tour of Latin America in spring 2020. When the world shut down in an effort to stop the spread of the coronavirus, like millions of others, she pivoted.

“Zoom turned out to be my saving grace,” Gutierrez says. She could speak with cooks throughout the Americas and watch them make dishes. “This was crucial, because so many of these recipes are just ‘a handful of this, a spoon of that, a tazón of that,’ and I would say, ‘Show me your tazón!’ because otherwise how would I know if their mug was the same size as my mug?”

She followed an especially rigorous recipe development and testing process. First, she acquired dozens of variations of a recipe from home cooks in different parts of each country, and, when possible, watched them make the dish. Then, she wrote a rough recipe and tested it. Once it worked, she made it three more times, on gas, electric and induction stoves. Next, she made it for someone from that country, to be sure it tasted right. Finally, it went to a professional tester — who took photos of each step — and two nonprofessional home cooks, to ensure it worked in different kitchens.

This sort of research and recipe development continued until she finished the manuscript in 2021. That summer, Gutierrez found herself in the hospital. Her recovery pushed the book back by a year, but also gave her a newfound determination to see the book through publication.

Recipes are organized in chapters by ingredient — corn, rice, potatoes, poultry, yuca, plantains, beans, squash, cacao and more — to highlight the essential elements that tie the diversity of dishes and flavors together. Many of the ingredients are indigenous to the Americas. Some arrived with Spanish conquistadors, some with enslaved Africans.

The melding of African, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Middle Eastern and indigenous ingredients and cuisines — including those of the Aztec, Taino, Matan, Mojo and many other groups — is a through line in the book. Some recipes can be traced back centuries. Others are only a few decades old. Gutierrez writes about the Caribbean coasts of Central America, where the Garifuna use plantains, coconut milk and allspice to flavor many dishes. In Peru, Brazil and other places where Chinese and Japanese immigrants settled, soy sauce and sesame oil factor into stir-fries and roasts.

Part reference book, part living history, part cookbook, “Latinísimo” is also a glimpse into Gutierrez’s life. She begins the headnote for tacos de pollo o de carne deshebrada (rolled chicken or beef tacos from Guatemala or Mexico): “They say that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, and this was certainly true with my husband, Luis, who loved these crunchy tacos from the very first bite.” The book is dedicated to Luis, who she says was instrumental in her recipe-testing process. “He’s an expert at finding ingredients! I would send him out with a list, and he would come back with everything — and often something extra, too,” she says, laughing.

When asked what she wants to write next, Gutierrez demurs. “I feel as though I’ve just had a baby, you know? And I need to spend some time with this baby, a few months at least, before I can be ready to think about whether I’m ready for another!”

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