Like Water for Chocolate

a book review in lieu of a recipe....

Currently, I am writing a 10,000 word paper on feasts. Ironically, it means I haven’t been feasting that much recently. I would lie and say I haven’t been living off of bagels and sea salt and balsamic kettle chips, but I do not have a very good poker face, and it’s quite obvious given the lack of engagement on my social medias that revolve around food. So, instead, to replace my absence, I have decided to share with you a rant written out of passion for a book I read last spring. It’s a book that might make you glorify cooking in the way that I do, so if it means you seek it out, even just on Google, I consider my work as successful.

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My Aunt Laine has spent much of her life in Mexico and found her great love there, too, my uncle. They often bestow upon me gifts that reflect the beauty of Mexican culture, a culture that, thanks to them, now plays a role in each of my family member's lives. 

Since my love for cooking has begun, those gifts have adjusted to emphasize the genuine brilliance that is Mexican food. So they gifted me a book: Like Water for Chocolate. This book has been sitting in my cookbook stack above my stove for about six months now, absorbing the smells and smoke of my various kitchen endeavors and accepting the turbulence of the books below it being erratically removed, replaced, and returned. In the heat of university and relationships, of parties, and overall stress and pressure, my urge to read, quite frankly, dissipated. That is, until this quiet week in May. 

Upon finishing The Alchemist, a book on self-discovery and the journey of life, the pendulum was swung, and my urge to read became a genuine need. Closing that final page had me searching my flat for a book that would further speak to me and feed the flame I had reignited. Amongst my most frequented book pile was one that I hadn’t opened in quite some time, a recipe book in novel form that tells a story of a life through food. It sat there, waiting for the perfect time to call my name, and suddenly, I heard it and went to it. And so, in three short days, I read this book. 

It’s magical. At least, to me, it is. My urge to write about it right now is because I need a way for it to carry on. Each chapter is a month of the year; each month has a recipe, and each recipe is a chapter within a series of stories. These stories are about tradition, about repression, about love and sex and hatred, about war and rebellion, and history. It’s about the life of Tita, the youngest of three daughters and, more so, the family chef. It seems the best way for her to communicate her lived experience is by the scents and tastes that provoke her memory. Page 9: ‘for smells have the power to evoke the past, bringing back sounds and even other smells that have no match in the present.’ Brilliant. 

And the way that Laura Esquivel writes makes me feel like I’m watching all of this soap opera drama in real time while also tasting the meals, traditional Mexican recipes that I have never seen, smelling the smoked chilis that I’ve never heard of, hearing the conversations of a language I don't speak, and envisioning the backdrop, the blueprint, of a home and a country I’ve never been to. It's entirely encompassing and beautifully engrossing. And yet it’s simple, magnificently nuanced. 

She describes the feeling of the first time you lock eyes with the one you will love as ‘how dough feels when it is plunged into boiling water’ (16). She describes the meals she prepares as her newly discovered system of communication, where she acts as the transmitter (52). She describes rose sauce as a ‘silent reminder’ of a memory (59) never to be spoken of again. She describes her frustration with a man as how burnt toast changes how the whole house smells (211).  She sees her kitchen as her territory, where she did not find burden but instead rid herself of it, a place of absolute peace and purpose, a place of refuge. 

These recipes present a life on a platter filled with joy, sorrow, frustration, and love, a life that survives through smells, ingredients, flashbacks, and beautiful, in-depth evocations of the senses. Apart from the recipes, lessons and resonance stung my life and outlook on the human experience. From excerpts like the following: 

“Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can't strike them all by ourselves; just as in the experiment, we need oxygen and a candle to help. In this case, the oxygen, for example, could be any kind of food, music, caress, word, or sound that engenders the explosion that lights one of the matches. For a moment we are dazzled by an intense emotion. A pleasant warmth grows within us, fading slowly as time goes by, until a new explosion comes along to revive it. Each person has to discover what will set off those explosions in order to live, since the combustion that occurs when one of them is ignited is what nourishes the soul. That fire, in short, is its food, if one doesn't find out in time what will set off these explosions, the box of matches dampens, and not a single match will ever be lighted’ pg. 115. 

Similar to Tita, it is love and food and love for food that is my oxygen.