Wild Card

Family Dinner: How Love Can Make or Break A Dish in Like Water for Chocolate

Make what with lots of love exactly? Why food of course! In the novel, Like Water for Chocolate, author Laura Esquivel plots the entire book to be centered around a forbidden passion, and even spices it up by incorporating traditional Mexican recipes. Esquivel’s main character, Tita, the youngest and most rebellious daughter, develops a profound and sensual love for her childhood acquaintance, Pedro. Although this long-established love is mutual, it simply is not allowed even the slightest bit of acknowledgment as long as Tita’s mother, Mama Elena, remains alive.

What else could possibly happen to make things worse? Pedro’s official marriage to Tita’s oldest sister, Rosaura, that’s what! This twisted marriage makes Pedro and Tita’s unofficial relationship even more complicated. Besides a few highly intense and secretive run-ins, Tita can only fully express her love for Pedro through her cooking. Utilizing the ranch kitchen as her mighty pen, Tita authors her personal love letters through her savory dishes, with love, and sometimes even anger and sadness being the message.

Chabela Wedding Cake: After cracking 170 eggs and Mama Elena gone, Tita was finally free to weep. With Nacha, the ranch’s head cook and main mother figure by her side, she cried out all of the emotions she had been suppressing since she found out about the heartbreaking engagement. She knew it meant complete separation from her true love for the rest of her life. Focusing on just her pain and sorrow, Tita paid little attention to the fact that her tears had actually made its way into the cake batter.

Typically, cake is one of the main types of food associated with happiness, but it brought about the opposite effect in this case. On the day of the wedding, after guests took a few bites of the delicious Chabela cake, they were all overcome with such intense emotion that they began to weep. Not the regular “weeping for joy” that guests normally shed during weddings; instead, their weeping flowed from the pain felt while yearning “for the love of their lives” they had either lost or could never have. The same exact sorrowful emotion Tita’s tears consisted of when streaming into the cake. Esquivel’s magical realism in this scene most certainly amplifies the effects of Tita’s cooking.

Weeping was not the only negative effect this traditional wedding feature induced. Puking was the next and final stage for all of its devourers, which for any wedding guest, would be an absolute nightmare to witness and endure. Esquivel utilizes this miserable wedding reception scene to literally and figuratively demonstrate how Tita’s raw emotions fuses together with the raw eggs to create a cake that engulfs its recipients in the same longing Tita endured the night before. It perfectly exemplifies that simply through her cooking, Tita’s agony along with any other emotion she felt, can be transmitted so purely to any person that eats her dish. In this incident, Tita’s heartbroken and love filled message comes with the unintentional consequence of inducing a cheerless gloom on what is to be a celebration. Thus, illustrating how her love ruins a dish, despite its avid deliciousness.

Quail with Rose Petal Sauce: Having been birthed in the kitchen, Tita spends the majority of her life in this practical room. When she isn’t eating and trying new dishes, she is learning all things culinary from Nacha. Their mutual passion for food and the kitchen allowed them both to share a mother-daughter connection that would become quite useful during Tita’s heartbroken stage. After Nacha’s death, Tita feels even more loss since the only person that understood her situation completely was now gone forever.

Since Tita is the only person who can actually cook like Nacha, she is promoted as the new head cook for the ranch. As a congratulatory gift, Pedro brings Tita a bouquet of roses and bestows it upon her in front of Mama Elena, Gertrudis, and Rosaura. This was one of the gestures that Pedro uses to communicate to Tita, reaffirming his love for her. Having noticed this sign, Tita feels immediate happiness. Of course, she is not the only one who notices — Mama Elena immediately commands her to throw out the flowers, seeing that it is a sign of complete disrespect towards Rosaura and her rules.

Instead of obeying her mother’s wishes, she decides to make a meal out the roses, directly inspired by Nacha. As she plucks off the feathers from the quails and combines the elements for the rose petal sauce, her pure joy and sensual desire towards Pedro emitts through every single ingredient. In addition, all of the skills and tricks she learned to prepare this dish is done in remembrance of Nacha, making this meal that much more special.

During dinner, Pedro and Gertrudis can feel Tita’s love radiating directly from the dish. Once they begin eating, all of Tita’s emotions are emanating within them as well. Furthermore, Esquivel describes, “Tita’s whole being dissolved into the rose petal sauce and quails… that’s how she invaded Pedro’s body,” (Esquivel, 1992, 189). Receiving the more strong and sensual side is Gertrudis, and receiving nothing but distaste and hatred is Mama Elena and Rosaura.

For Mama Elena and Rosaura, it is just another sign of trouble and disrespect coming from Tita, but for Pedro, it is the complete opposite. It means reassurance and confirmation of her love for him. It gives him a glimpse of her sensuality and desire, something he knows he will never experience with Rosaura. Every emotion he receives is intentionally sent by Tita and because of this, the dish is made perfectly for him.

“The secret is to make them with lots of love,” (Esquivel, 1992, 240).

Passion. That’s the key to all of Tita’s wonderful, traditional Mexican dishes. Her acquired skills from Nacha combined with her ever-present love for cooking and her soul mate empowers her with the ability to transmit her whole being into all of her recipes. From start to finish, she uses her dexterious talent of cooking to create a new method of communicating with Pedro. Through their distinctive language of food, her forbidden love is fully expressible — allowing her to hold nothing back. Thus, giving every dish she composes, her purest and most genuine feelings of passion and raw emotion. In the end, this universal emotion compliments the overall taste in all of her family’s recipes.

Works Cited

Like Water for Chocolate/Como Agua Para Chocolate. Dir. Lasse Hallström. Perf. Lumi Cavasos and Marco Leonardi. Miramax, 1992. Netflix.

Esquivel, Laura. Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments, with Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies. New York: Doubleday, 1992. Print.