Like Water for Chocolate: Laura Esquivel’s Novel of Love, Magic and Recipes in Revolutionary Mexico
Earthy, magical and utterly charming, this story of family life in early twentieth-century Mexico became a bestselling phenomenon with its winning mix of moving romance and bittersweet wit. Like Water for Chocolate (1989) is a romantic tale touched with moments of magic, invention and recipes.
Author: Laura Esquivel (born 1950)
Title: Like Water for Chocolate (Como agua para chocolate, 1989)
Format: English paperback (Black Swan), 224 pages
Scope: Novel in monthly instalments, with recipes, loves and home remedies
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/0552995878 (ASIN 0552995878)
Tita
The novel tells the strange story of the De la Garza family, made up entirely of women. Tita, the youngest daughter, is forbidden to marry: family tradition condemns her to look after her mother until she dies. But Tita falls in love with Pedro, and he is seduced by the magical food she cooks.
An Unconsummated Passion
In desperation, Pedro marries her sister Rosaura so that he can be near Tita, and the two are forced to circle each other in an unconsummated passion. Only a strange chain of tragedies, bad luck and fate finally bring them together against all odds.
Twelve Months, Twelve Recipes
The original subtitle describes the book as a novel in monthly instalments, with recipes, loves and home remedies. Each of its twelve chapters is named after a month and opens with a recipe, from Christmas rolls to turkey mole and chiles in walnut sauce, and the preparation of the dish runs through the chapter alongside the story. The narrator is Tita’s great-niece, who has inherited her cookbook, so the novel is also a family history passed down through recipes.
Food as Feeling
In Tita’s kitchen, emotion becomes physical. When she cries into the batter of her sister’s wedding cake, the guests are overcome by longing and sorrow. When she cooks quails in rose-petal sauce with roses Pedro has given her, her sister Gertrudis is so inflamed that she runs off with a revolutionary soldier, and later returns as a general. Tita learned to cook from Nacha, the old Indigenous cook who raised her in the kitchen, and through food she expresses everything her tyrannical mother, Mama Elena, forbids her to say.
Revolution in the Background
The story takes place during the Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910, and the war arrives at the ranch in raids, requisitions and Gertrudis’s adventures. Esquivel uses it lightly, as a backdrop to the domestic revolution in which Tita gradually frees herself from her mother’s rule, encouraged by a gentle American doctor, John Brown. The title is a Mexican expression: to be "like water for chocolate" is to be at boiling point, as water must be for making hot chocolate, with anger or with passion.
Book and Film
Esquivel wrote the screenplay for the 1992 film directed by her then husband, Alfonso Arau, which became one of the most successful Mexican films of its time abroad. She later turned to politics and was elected to the Mexican Chamber of Deputies in 2018.
Magical Realism in the Kitchen
Esquivel’s novel is often compared with Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, and it shares that book’s matter-of-fact treatment of the impossible: tears that flood a kitchen, a shower that catches fire from a woman’s desire. But where García Márquez works on the scale of a whole town and a century, Esquivel stays inside one house and one woman’s heart, and her magic grows from the most domestic of activities. Readers who enjoy cooking will find the recipes genuinely usable, if somewhat imprecise in the manner of family cookbooks.
Why Read It
Each chapter opens with a recipe, and Tita’s emotions pass into the dishes she cooks, with extraordinary effects on everyone who eats them. It is one of the most delightful examples of magical realism, and it was a number-one bestseller in Mexico before becoming an international success.
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