Significance Of Food In Like Water For Chocolate

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The Significance of Food in Like Water for Chocolate “When I cook certain dishes, I smell my grandmother’s kitchen, my grandmother’s smells. I thought: what a wonderful way to tell a story.” This quote, said by Laura Esquivel in a New York Times interview, demonstrates the amount of passion and personal connection that the author used to write her novel Like Water for Chocolate. The book is subtitled, “A Novel in Monthly Installments With Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies”. As suggested by this title, the novel is essentially a package of genres and ideals that are centered around family recipes. The novel captivates its readers with an exotic tale of love and identity, but also provides an understanding of Mexican food and culture. It would be an understatement, however, to merely say that an understanding of food is derived from reading this novel. Food drives this novel forward, chapter by chapter, in such a way that it creates calmness in a storyline that is bursting with anxiety. Like Water for Chocolate demonstrates the significance of food by using it’s preparation and consumption as a way of honoring family history and traditions, providing an escape from hardships, and conveying specific emotions. From the very first page it is clear that food plays an important role in this family. The mention of onions in the recipe for Christmas Rolls introduces the story of Tita’s unusual birth that took place on the kitchen table after the onions made her mother cry so hard that she went into labor (Esquivel 6). Tita was literally born into the cooking traditions of her family, which is somewhat ironic because it is one of the only family traditions that work out in her favor. She did not know at this point that she would soon be denied the right to marry, due to a long-standing family tradition that the youngest daughter must spend her life taking care of her

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