Like Water for Chocolate

Plot

The book is divided into 12 sections named after the months of the year, starting in January and continuing in December. Each section begins with a Mexican recipe. The chapters outline the preparation of the dish and ties it to an event in the protagonist's life.

Tita de la Garza, the novel's main protagonist, is 15 at the start of the story. She lives with her mother Mama Elena, and her older sisters Gertrudis and Rosaura, on a ranch near the Mexico – US border.

Pedro is a neighbor and another main protagonist with whom Tita falls in love at first sight. The feeling turns out to be mutual, so Pedro asks Mama Elena for Tita’s hand in marriage. Unfortunately, Mama Elena forbids it, citing the de la Garza family tradition that the youngest daughter (in this case Tita) must remain unmarried and take care of her mother until her mother's death. She suggests that Pedro marries Tita's sister, Rosaura, instead of Tita. In order to stay close to Tita, Pedro decides to follow Mama Elena's advice.

Tita has a love of the kitchen and a deep connection with food, a skill enhanced by the fact that Nacha, the family cook, was her primary caretaker as Tita grew up. Her love for cooking also comes from the fact that she was born in the kitchen.

In preparation of the wedding, Tita is forced to prepare the cake with Nacha. While preparing the cake, Tita is over come with sadness, and cries into the cake batter. At the wedding everyone gets violently sick, vomiting everywhere. Suspecting Tita was behind the incident, Mama Elena punishes Tita. After the wedding, Nacha is found dead, with a picture of her fiancé.

Pedro and Rosaura have a son, Roberto. Rosaura is unable to nurse Roberto, so Tita brings Roberto to her breast to stop the baby from crying. Tita begins to produce breast milk and is able to nurse the baby. This draws her and Pedro closer than ever. They begin meeting secretly, snatching their few times together by sneaking around the ranch and behind the backs of Mama Elena and Rosaura.

Tita’s strong emotions become infused into her cooking, and she unintentionally begins to affect the people around her through the food she prepares. After one particularly rich meal of quail in rose petal sauce flavored with Tita’s erotic thoughts of Pedro, Gertrudis becomes inflamed with lust and leaves the ranch in order to make ravenous love to a revolutionary soldier on the back of a horse, later ending up in a brothel and subsequently disowned by her mother.

Rosaura and Pedro are forced to leave for San Antonio, Texas, at the urging of Mama Elena, who suspects a relationship between Tita and Pedro. Rosaura loses her son Roberto and later becomes infertile from complications during the birth of her daughter Esperanza.

Upon learning the news of her nephew's death, whom she cared for herself, Tita blames her mother. Mama Elena responds by smacking Tita across the face with a wooden spoon. Tita, destroyed by the death of her beloved nephew and unwilling to cope with her mother's controlling ways, secludes herself in the dovecote until the sympathetic Dr. John Brown soothes and comforts her. Mama Elena states there is no place for "lunatics" like Tita on the farm, and wants her to be institutionalized. However, the doctor decides to take care of Tita at his home instead. Tita develops a close relationship with Dr. Brown, even planning to marry him at one point, but her underlying feelings for Pedro do not waver.

While John is away, Tita loses her virginity to Pedro. A month later, Tita is worried she may be pregnant with Pedro’s child. Her mother's ghost taunts her, telling her that she and her child are cursed. Gertrudis visits the ranch for a special holiday and makes Pedro overhear about Tita’s pregnancy, causing Tita and Pedro to argue about running away together. This causes Pedro to get drunk and sing below Tita’s window while she is arguing with Mama Elena’s ghost. Just as she confirms she isn't pregnant and frees herself of her mother's grasp once and for all, Mama Elena's ghost gets revenge on Tita by setting Pedro on fire, leaving him bedridden for a while and behaving like “a child throwing a tantrum”. Meanwhile, Tita is preparing for John's return, and is hesitant to tell him that she cannot marry him because she is no longer a virgin. Rosaura comes to the kitchen while Tita is cooking and argues with her over Tita's involvement with Rosaura’s daughter Esperenza’s life and the tradition of the youngest daughter remaining at home to care for the mother until she dies, a tradition which Tita despises. She vows not to let it ruin her niece's life as it did hers. John and his deaf great-aunt come over and Tita tells him that she cannot marry him. John seems to accept it, “reaching for Tita’s hand...with a smile on his face”.

Many years later, Tita is preparing for Esperanza’s and John's son Alex’s wedding to one another, now that Rosaura has died from digestive problems. During the wedding, Pedro proposes to Tita saying that he does not want to “die without making [Tita] [his] wife”. Tita accepts and Pedro dies making love to her in the kitchen storage room right after the wedding. Tita is overcome with sorrow and cold, and begins to eat matches. The matches are sparked by the heat of Pedro's memory, creating a spectacular fire that engulfs them both, eventually consuming the entire ranch.

The narrator of the story is the daughter of Esperanza, nicknamed "Tita", after her great-aunt. She describes how after the fire, the only thing that survived under the smoldering rubble of the ranch was Tita's cookbook, which contained all the recipes described in the preceding chapters.

Characters

Self growth

At the beginning of the novel, Tita was a generally submissive young lady. As the novel progresses, Tita learns to disobey the injustice of her mother, and gradually becomes more and more adept at expressing her inner fire through various means. Cooking through enlightenment she learned to express her feelings, and cope with her mother.

Violence

Mama Elena often resorts to violence as she forces Tita to obey her. Many of the responsibilities she imposes on Tita, especially those relating to Pedro and Rosaura's wedding, are blatant acts of cruelty, given Tita's pain over losing Pedro. Mama Elena meets Tita's slightest protest with angry tirades and beatings. If she even suspects that Tita has not fulfilled her duties, she beats her. For example, when she thought that Tita intentionally ruined the wedding cake. When Tita dares to stand up to her mother, blaming her for Roberto's death, Mama Elena smacks her across the face, breaking her nose. Since Mama Elena must protect herself and her family from bandits and revolutionaries, her cruelty could be interpreted for strength. Then again, Tita's later illusions indicate that Mama Elena's actions were far from typical and deeply scarred Tita.

Passion

The romantic love that is so exalted throughout the novel is forbidden by Tita's mother in order to blindly enforce the tradition that the youngest daughter be her mother's chaste guardian. However, the traditional etiquette enforced by Mama Elena is defied progressively throughout the novel. This parallels the setting of the Mexican Revolution growing in intensity. The novel further parallels the Mexican Revolution because during the Mexican Revolution the power of the country was in the hands of a select few and the people had no power to express their opinions. Likewise, in Like Water for Chocolate, Mama Elena represents the select few who had the power in their hands, while Tita represents the people because she had no power to express her opinions but had to obey her mother's rules.

Food

Food is also one of the major themes in the story which is seen throughout the story. It is used very creatively to represent the characters feelings and situations. Due to the magical nature of food in the series, it has literal effects on the people of the food in terms of infusing the cook Tita's emotions into the food which are thus transferred beyond the food into the hearts and minds of those who devour it.

Meaning of title

Like Water for Chocolate's full title is: Like Water for Chocolate: A novel in monthly installments with recipes, romances and home remedies.

The phrase "like water for chocolate" comes from the Spanish como agua para chocolate. This phrase is a common expression in some Spanish-speaking countries and was the inspiration for Laura Esquivel's novel title and it means that one is very angry. In some Latin American countries, such as Mexico, hot chocolate is made not with milk, but with near-boiling water instead.

An alternate interpretation of the saying "like water for chocolate" is to be like water that is hot enough to receive the chocolate (when preparing hot chocolate to drink). It is a simile for describing a state of passion or sexual arousal (i.e. 'hot and ready'). This would describe the bubbling passion Tita and Pedro have for each other throughout the book.

Another meaning of the title is the double meaning present in the story's situation. The sister who ends up marrying Pedro is about as good a substitute for the one he loves as water, in a recipe that calls for chocolate. Substituting the wrong sister is making a very poor switch, like water for chocolate.

Reception

The Washington Post summed up the novel's significance to the genre and cultural history: it “portray[s] the fantastical as everyday," and "aims to portray the onset of Mexican feminism." The reviewer described the novel "an overly rich fable."

Publication history

Like Water for Chocolate has been translated from the original Spanish into numerous languages; the English translation is by Carol and Thomas Christensen. The novel has sold close to a million copies in Spain and Hispanic America and at last count, in 1993, more than 202,000 copies in the United States.