Building Home: How A Sassy Spoon Preserves Cuban Food, Family and Tradition

Home is a place, of course, but it can also be a Sunday dinner, a recipe you watched your mom make countless times, the familiar taste of a dish that takes you straight back to childhood, or the moment you add your own twist to a meal passed down through generations.

This Hispanic Heritage Month, we’re celebrating the publishers in the Mediavine community who are building businesses rooted in their own stories, cultures, and experiences. We’re exploring the idea of home, not only as the place where we live, but as something we create through food, family, heritage, and tradition.

Few stories capture that idea quite like that of Jamie Silva, founder of A Sassy Spoon. A Miami native and first-generation Cuban-American, Jamie launched A Sassy Spoon in 2016 to share the Cuban recipes she grew up eating, along with Latin-inspired comfort food.

Ten years later, what started as a leap into entrepreneurship has grown into an established brand and, just as importantly, a digital home where Jamie can preserve the food, memories, and traditions that shaped her.

Turning Tradition Into Her Own Terms 

This year marks a major milestone for Jamie: 10 years of A Sassy Spoon. Getting there meant choosing a path that wasn’t necessarily the one she had been raised to follow.

Jamie’s parents came to the United States from Cuba in the 1970s. Like many children of immigrants, she grew up with a familiar definition of success: pursue an education, find a stable job, build a family, and work hard. Entrepreneurship, and all the uncertainty that comes with it, wasn’t exactly part of the plan.

But in 2016, Jamie decided to take the leap anyway. As she puts it:

“I started A Sassy Spoon® from scratch, and I built it into something that let me create a home on my own terms, one where I get to be close to my culture, my family, and the food I grew up on, instead of the version of home I was handed as the ‘safe’ path.”

Today, A Sassy Spoon has reached more than 14 million pageviews, with Jamie serving as its founder, recipe developer, food photographer, and content strategist. But the accomplishment she’s most proud of isn’t captured by a traffic number. It’s building a business that lets her stay close to what matters most.

Rooted in Family Recipes

Long before A Sassy Spoon existed, Jamie grew up watching her mom cook in the family kitchen. The recipes at the heart of the site trace back to those moments: classic Cuban dishes prepared from scratch, often measured not in cups and tablespoons but in her mom’s favorite measurement, un poquito, or “a little bit.”

Sundays were particularly memorable. They meant family gathering around slow-cooked dishes like arroz con pollo and carne con papas. Those Sundays are some of Jamie’s favorite childhood memories, and they’ve only grown more meaningful with time.

Those memories would eventually become the spark for A Sassy Spoon.

“A Sassy Spoon®’s whole foundation is about watching my mom cook classic Cuban recipes growing up. It’s literally why the brand exists and why it reads as authentic as it does. Food is a big deal in Cuban families (well, in Hispanic families in general.) so, I’m grateful I get to recreate and preserve those recipes on A Sassy Spoon® not just for my own family, but for my readers’ families too.”

And this year, that story has come full circle. Jamie’s mom recently moved in with her, which means the two now get to cook together every day. In many ways, the kitchen that inspired Jamie’s business has come back to life, this time in her own home.

A Taste of Home, Wherever You Are

There’s a reason food can create such a powerful connection to home. A recipe can outlive the person who first taught it to us. It can cross borders and generations. It can turn an ordinary weeknight dinner into a reminder of a kitchen, a person, or a place that might otherwise feel very far away.

For Jamie, preserving Cuban food has always been about preserving those connections. As a first-generation Cuban-American, she felt that Cuban cuisine was underrepresented compared with other Latin cuisines. A Sassy Spoon became her way of keeping those recipes alive, along with the culture, memories, and traditions surrounding them alive. In the process, Jamie has created a space where Cuban food can be shared, celebrated, and passed on to the next generation.

Her mission has resonated far beyond her own family. Jamie regularly hears from readers who have moved away from South Florida or lost Cuban relatives who once made the dishes they grew up on. Without those family members to guide them, recipes can be difficult to recreate, especially when they were passed down through observation and un poquito rather than written instructions.

“As a first-generation Cuban-American, I feel the need to keep my Cuban heritage alive in the best way I know how, through food. I hope people feel connected to my content when they see all the memorable Cuban recipes they can continue to make for generations to come.”

For some readers, Jamie’s recipes offer a way back to something familiar. For others, they’re their very first introduction to Cuban food. Either way, those recipes make their biggest impact at the table, shared with loved ones.

When a Digital Brand Becomes a Gathering Place

Jamie’s story reminds us what makes publishing so powerful. A website can be a business and still be deeply personal. 

A Sassy Spoon has grown because Jamie has spent a decade creating useful, approachable recipes for her readers. Behind those recipes is something that can’t be manufactured: a lifetime of memories, family traditions, and cultural knowledge.

Readers search her site for classic Latin dishes like ropa vieja and maduros, and are greeted with a reminder of home. Jamie has built a place where readers can find both the recipes their families likely made and the comfort of feeling close to the people who made them.

A Decade In, With More to Share

Ten years after taking the leap to start her own business, Jamie has built something bigger than the path she originally imagined for herself. She’s built a successful independent brand around the food she loves. She’s created an archive of recipes that might otherwise live only in memories and family kitchens. 

And she’s helping other Cuban families keep those dishes on their own tables for another generation. Now, she gets to share a kitchen again with the person who helped inspire it all.

For Jamie, these recipes are a way to stay connected to where she came from while creating something her family, and her readers, can carry forward and pass on.

This Hispanic Heritage Month, we’re proud to celebrate Jamie, A Sassy Spoon and the publishers throughout our community whose businesses show us that home, like culture and tradition, is something we carry forward, make our own, and share with the people who come next.

Explore A Sassy Spoon to discover Jamie’s collection of approachable Cuban and Latin-inspired recipes, from the classics she grew up with to new favorites worth bringing to your own table.