[In the following essay, Jaffe studies the symbol of the kitchen in Esquivel's novel, contending that it serves as a mode for women's creativity as well as a means to promote female solidarity.]

During the same era that inspired the suspicion of women's activities in the kitchen cited in my epigraph,¹ the Mexican nun Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz boldly celebrates the phenomena of the kitchen as worthy of philosophical observation:

And what shall I tell you, lady, of the natural secrets I have discovered while cooking? I see that an egg holds together and fries in butter or in oil, but, on the contrary, in syrup shrivels into shreds; observe that to keep sugar in a liquid state one need only add a drop or two of water in which a quince or other bitter fruit has been soaked; observe that the yolk and the white of one egg are so dissimilar that each with sugar produces a result not obtainable with both together. I do not wish to weary you with such inconsequential matters, and make mention of them only to give you full notice of my nature, for I believe they will be occasion for laughter. But, lady, as women, what wisdom may be ours if not the philosophies of the kitchen? Lupercio Leonardo spoke well when he said: how well one may philosophize when preparing dinner. And I often say, when observing these trivial details: had Aristotle prepared vituals, he would have written more.²

While sor Juana's ironized self-mockery for commenting on “these trivial details” reflects her frustration both at the confinement of women to this domestic sphere and at others' belittling of life in the kitchen, her culinary literary analogy at the end offers a tantalizing invitation. I begin with sor Juana because the recent novel couplings of culinary and literary creation which are the subject of this paper echo, at times deliberately, sor Juana's words.

Three centuries after sor Juana decried the forced relegation of women to the domestic sphere, represented by the kitchen, Rosario Castellanos denounced more emphatically the assumption that women's domain is the kitchen. In her story “Cooking Lesson,” the narrator, an educated newlywed woman untrained in cooking announces sarcastically, “My place is here. I've been here from the beginning of time. In the German proverb woman is synonymous with Kuche, Kinder, Kirche.”³ That Rosario Castellanos' feminist messages to Mexican women have taken root finds affirmation in Jean Franco's conclusion in Plotting Women that the goal of rejecting patriarchal domination has compelled “contemporary women novelists not only in Mexico but all over Latin America to move beyond the confines of domesticity.”⁴ Yet, surprisingly, a number of Hispanic American and Latina women writers seem to be reclaiming the kitchen, perhaps affirming seriously the declaration which Castellanos' new bride offers sarcastically.

In Laura Esquivel's Como agua para chocolate (novela de entregas mensuales con recetas, amores y remedios caseros), Like Water for Chocolate (Novel of Monthly Installments with Recipes, Loves and Home Remedies), the recipes for twelve sumptuous Mexican dishes form the narrative frame, and the protagonist learns and teaches “los secretos de la vida” “the secrets of life” in the kitchen.⁵ The popularity of Esquivel's 1989 novel—into its eighth printing by October of 1991—seems to have resuscitated heirs to the Dominican friar's wariness of women in the kitchen, such as a critic who, dismissing Como agua para chocolate and its peculiar use of recipes as entirely lacking in literary merit, declares that, “no tiene otra aspiracion que ser novedosa” “it has no aspiration but to be novel.”⁶ However, the novelty of Esquivel's enterprise, bringing together two supposedly incompatible companions for women today, the kitchen and writing, does have its ancestry, as does a certain skeptical response it evokes. Admittedly, Esquivel's concoction, which unabashedly mimics the form of a serialized romance or folletin while doubling as a cookbook, may incur criticism for uniting two literary forms notoriously and pejoratively associated with Cortazarian lectores-hembra or “female-readers.”⁷ But I find enormously suggestive the popular appeal of this recent lighthearted blending of ingredients from the kitchen and the folletin, far transcending the “female-reader” audience of serial fiction and popular romances. Specifically, I see in Esquivel's narrative a particularly liberating revival of sor Juana's analogy, whose timeliness today is evident in a veritable buffet of recipes for writing by Latin American and Latina women. A taste of some of this literature may reassure concerned readers; none of this plethora of new works advocates a return to the proverbial state of “barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen,” or “la mujer honrada, la pierna quebrada y en casa.”

In 1984 the organizers of a conference dedicated to the writings of Latin American and Latina women proclaimed the importance of the kitchen for women writers when they published the conference proceedings under the title La sarten por el mango, The Frying Pan by the Handle. Editor Patricia Elena Gonzalez summarizes their discussions of women's writing with a metaphoric call to take up their pots and pans: “Diriamos que a medida que cort-abamos la cebolla, llorabamos; pero al pelar las capas artificialmente superpuestas sobre nuestra identidad como mujer latinoamericana, encontrabamos un centro. Orale, a tomar la sarten por el mango y a guisar.” “We could say that as we cut the onion, we cried; but upon peeling off the layers superimposed artificially over our identity as Latin American women, we found a center. Alright now, time to take the frying pan by the handle and start cooking.”⁸ Pointing to the correspondences between cooking and writing, at this conference the Puerto Rican Rosario Ferre described her development as a writer in terms of the kitchen in an essay entitled “La cocina de la escritura” “The Kitchen of Writing.”⁹ Sor Juana's assertion that, had he cooked, Aristotle would have written more, appears as the epigraph to this essay. Another work by Ferre, the story “El collar de camandulas” “The Rosary Chain,” begins and ends with the whispered recitation of a family recipe for poundcake that evolves as a sign of the bond between the story's two female characters and, implicitly, a female reader. At the conclusion of the story the surviving, silenced female character employs the recipe to liberate herself from her male oppressors.¹⁰ When women writers of color in the United States, including several Latina writers, founded the Kitchen Table Press in 1981, providing a liberating voice for themselves, the name was chosen, “because the kitchen is the center of the home, the place where women in particular work and communicate with each other.”¹¹ Sharing this vision, the Latina writer, Helena Maria Viramontes, entitles her essayistic testimonial about her commitment to writing “‘Nopalitos’: The Making of Fiction” and likens her own creative process to that of her mother preparing nopalitos. Humbly, she acknowledges, “I have never been able to match her nopales, but I have inherited her capacity for invention,” and, hence, learned to find “my space on the kitchen table” for writing.¹² Each of these writers' kitchens or milieux as well as their cooking methods is unique and warrants individual study. Nonetheless, what links the works of all of these women writing after Rosario Castellanos is their reclaiming of the kitchen as a space of creative power rather than merely confinement, in literature which, like Como agua para chocolate, seems to address itself primarily to a complicit female audience.

“Como agua para chocolate” is a Mexican idiom which means extremely agitated or, in the English equivalent, boiling mad.¹³ But this title's culinary origin hints that to truly appreciate its meaning requires not only reading the novel but also preparing its recipe for chocolate. Similarly, from beginning to end, Como agua para chocolate foregrounds parallels between culinary and literary creation. This liaison is implicit on the novel's first page when the protagonist, Tita de la Garza, is born prematurely onto the kitchen table amid the ingredients of her art: “entre los olores de una sopa de fideos que se estaba cocinando, los del tomillo, el laurel, el cilantro, el de la leche hervida, el de los ajos y, por supuesto, el de la cebolla” “among the aromas of a noodle soup that was cooking, of the thyme, the bay leaf, the cilantro, the boiled milk, the garlic and, of course, the onion”¹³. A prototypical domestic literary form, Tita's diary cum recipe book, edited by her grandniece, comprises the serialized novel we read. Briefly, her story, the serial romance or novela por entregas surrounding Tita's recipes, is this. As the youngest daughter of the tyrannical Mama Elena, a widowed ranch owner living somewhere near the Mexican/U.S. border on the eve of the Mexican revolution, a mysterious family tradition dictates that marriage is forbidden her; instead she must remain at home to feed and care for her mother until the latter's death. The expression, “como agua para chocolate,” then, describes Tita's anger at her confinement to the kitchen as she endeavors to surmount the obstacles to her happiness. Tita's fate, which motivates the plot, rivals the most contrived of folletin stories, and her obedient intentions in the face of her mother's cruel domination reflect the polarized characterization typical of serialized fiction.¹⁴ However, in Como agua para chocolate the formulae of the folletin, including its episodic romantic plot and its melodramatic effects, are adapted to highlight the novel's recipes and the life of the kitchen.

Each chapter's title is that of the recipe to be recounted in it, a mouth-watering list of ingredients serves almost as a table of contents for each chapter, and the narrative begins with appetite-whetting instructions for preparing the recipe which Tita is engaged in making. Of course, because Tita is besieged with interruptions, like the women writers Virginia Woolf describes in A Room of One's Own, each recipe's narration is inevitably suspended to incorporate the incidents which intrude upon her cooking.¹⁵ Likewise, the anticipated meal necessarily returns to preempt other activities and their narration. These competing but complementary narratives reinforce one another in postponing the final denouement of the folletin, but the recipes and events narrated are also meant to mirror one another in eliciting nostalgic or erotic responses from their audience. Exemplifying this symbiosis, every chapter concludes, in folletinesque fashion, with a crisis resolved and a meal completed only to precipitate another unforeseen occurrence and accompanying dish, to be taken up in the following chapter. Consequently, a cliffhanging ellipsis and the promise “continuara” “to be continued,” closes every chapter, followed by the name of the upcoming recipe, as if the recipe itself were part of the cataclysmic event whose narrative we anxiously awaited. And, in a sense this is so, because in this novelistic world the unique manner of preparing a recipe can unleash untold euphoria or despair. Tita's unintentional modification of the recipe for “Codornices en petalos de rosas” “Quails in rose petals,” for instance, provokes such unbridled passion in her sister Gertrudis that she abandons the family and is catapulted into an erotic encounter on horseback with an unidentified villista. Similarly, when, true to folletin plotting, Tita's sister Rosaura betrays her by marrying Tita's true love, Pedro, and, to make matters worse, Tita has to prepare the wedding cake, our heroine's tears in the cake batter inspire a disastrous eruption of nostalgic weeping and vomiting among the wedding guests. No longer trivial or incidental, here the art of recipe-making determines the peripeties of plot. Furthermore, the narration of recipes itself works to define the relationship between reader, narrator and protagonist.

With a knowing wink to readers who enjoy the arts of recipe sharing and kitchen talk, the narrator initiates a conversation in the novel's first paragraph, on the significant topic of onions. Like Patricia Elena Gonzalez, whose words in La sarten por el mango I repeated earlier, Tita's grand-niece strays from the metaphoric image of an onion's layers to recall the more literal tear-jerking activity of chopping them. The narrator and Tita seem to unite in this gesture, as if to entice those who love the smell of onions and know the almost cathartic experience of chopping and sobbing. In addition, with the revelation of her own sensitivity to onions and of a family secret to avoid that inevitable flood of tears, the narrator exposes parallels between recipe sharing and narrative.

La cebolla tiene que estar finamente picada. Les sugiero ponerse un pequeno trozo de cebolla en la mollera con el fin de evitar el molesto lagrimeo que se produce cuando uno la esta cortando. Lo malo de llorar cuando uno pica cebolla no es el simple hecho de llorar, sino que a veces uno empieza, como quien dice, se pica, y ya no puede parar. No se si a ustedes les ha pasado pero a mi la mera verdad si. Infinidad de veces. Mama decia que era porque yo soy igual de sensible a la cebolla que Tita, mi tia abuela.¹³

The onion must be finely minced. I suggest you place a little piece of onion on your forehead to avoid the annoying tears that come when you're chopping it. The bad thing about crying when you chop onions isn't the simple fact of crying, but that sometimes you begin, as they say, you get an itch and you can't stop scratching. I don't know if this has happened to you, but to me, the simple truth is it has. Hundreds of times. Mom used to say that it was because I'm just as sensitive to onions as Tita, my great aunt.

The narrator, with her colloquial language and tone, simultaneously introduces three generations of women who have shared recipes, and invites the implied readers, “Uds.,” into the kitchen to participate in this activity. What makes a recipe especially appealing for a listener, she knows, is an accompanying story, in this case, as the narrator's admission of her and Tita's enormous sensitivity to onions suggests, a tear-jerking tale. The narrator is alluding to Tita's plight, and we are perhaps also meant to read in this an allusion to the norms of the folletin romance, comically adapted by Esquivel. More significant than the folletin here, however, is the “embedded discourse” of the recipe, which Susan J. Leonardi has explored as a predominantly feminine narrative strategy that, like recipe's root in Latin, recipere, “implies an exchange, a giver, and a receiver.”¹⁶ Her illustration, from cookbooks and novels incorporating recipes, of recipe exchange as a contract of trust or understanding between giver and receiver, narrator and listener aptly characterizes Laura Esquivel's culinary narrative. When the narrator in Como agua para chocolate introduces herself, her mother and Tita in the opening paragraph she begins to construct the community described by Leonardi, “a loose community of women that crosses the social barriers of class, race, and generation” (342).

Ignoring Mexican norms that prescribe familial allegiance while implicitly proscribing alliances across class and racial lines, this recipe-sharing community relies on different codes of female solidarity, read through characters' responses to recipes and the kitchen. Bonds of friendship form among characters who appreciate what sor Juana calls “the natural secrets” of the kitchen, the artistry in creating and preparing recipes, and also their restorative powers. The ranch's Indian cook Nacha, Tita, the maid Chencha, the family doctor's Kickapoo grandmother, and, peripherally, Tita's sister Gertrudis, compose this female community. In this regard, Esquivel's “Novela de entregas mensuales” “Novel of monthly installments” can be seen both to mirror the format of serialized fiction and to allude to a specifically female creative community, temporally oriented around a monthly (mensual) menstrual cycle.

Tita, born on the kitchen table into such a world, learns the secrets of life in the kitchen from Nacha, who feeds her as an infant and entertains her through childhood by investing games related to cooking. Tita's childhood in the kitchen, including her play and conversation with Nacha, constitutes an apprenticeship in an artist's studio, which Tita directs after Nacha's death. “Tita era el ultimo eslabon de una cadena de cocineras que desde la epoca prehispanica se habian transmitido los secretos de la cocina de generacion en generacion y estaba considerada como la mejor exponente de este maravilloso arte, el arte culinario” “Tita was the last link in a chain of cooks who since prehispanic times had been transmitting the secrets of the kitchen from generation to generation and was considered the finest practitioner of this marvellous art, culinary art” (53). The tradition which Tita carries on is an oral one, learned experientially; however, with the death of Nacha Tita recognizes the fragility of a dying art, particularly recipes which Tita herself only vaguely recalls. These recipes, at the opportune moment for their use, are whispered by Nacha to Tita from beyond the grave. Gertrudis, perhaps the most devoted fan of Tita's recipes, fears that when her sister dies, “moriria junto con ella el pasado de su familia” “the family's past would die along with her” (182). Understanding both their evanescence in the absence of Nacha and their restorative function in Tita's daily life, Tita records the recipes, together with their accompanying story, because the situation of the recipe, such as Gertrudis' euphoria after tasting “Codornices en petalos de rosas” “Quails in rose petals,” is inseparable in Tita's mind from the instructions for preparing the dish itself. Implicit in Tita's salvaging of Nacha's recipes in their context is a sense of the art of recipe narration as “embedded discourse.” “Like a story, a recipe needs a recommendation, a context, a point, a reason to be” (Leonardi, 340).

That reason to be, for Tita, resides especially in recipes' effects on their audience. Nacha's recipes are life sustaining for Tita; they inspire her to write her life to preserve the recipes, and, more literally, Nacha's soups restore Tita to health. Following a nervous breakdown, Tita yearns to remember any recipe, because this would mean “volver a la vida” “returning to life” (131). Significantly, the word “recetas” in Spanish refers not only to recipes for food but to prescriptions for medicine. Likewise, the phrase “remedios caseros” in the novel's subtitle describes various home remedies interspersed through the narrative, but is also suggestive of the therapeutic character of the kitchen, specifically its recipes and accompanying conversation. Although the conversation centered on recipesharing and cooking in this kitchen falls short of that which the African American writer Paule Marshall heard as a child among “the poets in the kitchen,” Marshall's description of these women's talk reflects its restorative quality. “There was no way for me to understand it at the time, but the talk that filled the kitchen those afternoons was highly functional. It served as therapy, the cheapest kind available to my mother and her friends … it restored them to a sense of themselves and reaffirmed their self-worth.”¹⁷ In the kitchen with Nacha Tita experiences this therapy which both solaces and entertains.

The description of the kitchen, paradoxically symbolic of both confinement and escape, is suggestive of its dual role. The narrator purports to offer an image of the kitchen as an illustration of how it limits Tita's vision of the world, but the spatial imagery contradicts this message.

No era facil para una persona que conocio la vida a traves de la cocina entender el mundo exterior. Ese gigantesco mundo que empezaba de la puerta de la cocina hacia el interior de la casa, porque el que colindaba con la puerta trasera de la cocina y que daba al patio, a la huerta, a la hortaliza, si le pertenecia por completo, lo dominaba. (14-15)

It wasn't easy for a person who knew life by way of the kitchen to understand the outside world. This gigantic world which began from the kitchen door toward the inside of the house, because the one that lay adjacent to the back door of the kitchen and that overlooked the patio, the fruit garden, the vegetable garden, yes it belonged completely to her, she controlled it.

Even though the world denied to Tita is represented as “gigantesco” “gigantic” it seems to lead no farther than the inside of the house, while the world of the kitchen also comprehends a vast, open expanse outside the back door. Furthermore, the verbs employed to link this world to Tita, “le pertenecia” “belonged to her” and “lo dominaba” “she dominated it” are indicative of the protagonist's need for a space to control her own destiny, as she ultimately does through her recipes which transcend these confines. As the narrator explains, even Mama Elena cannot entirely repress Tita in the kitchen environment which inspires her creative expression, because “ahi escapaban de su riguroso control los sabores, los olores, las texturas y lo que estas pudieran provocar” “there the flavors, aromas, textures and what these might provoke escaped her rigorous control” (53). Cruel rigor typifies Mama Elena's management of Tita's life, in and out of the kitchen. An unexcelled master at any skill concerning “partir, desmantelar, desmembrar, desolar, destetar, desjarretar, desbarratar o desmadrar” “splitting open, dismantling, dismembering, desolating, weaning, ham-stringing, destroying or separating a child from its mother (demothering),” one fundamental rule of culinary, or literary, art eludes Mama Elena, the need to adapt the rules to one's own creative talent. If Tita strays from the precise rules for a recipe, as with Rosaura's wedding cake and the “Codornices en petalos de rosas,” she arouses Mama Elena's destructive fury. But Tita's creative spirit and its transformative power remain invincible. “Pero no podia evitar la tentacion de transgredir las formulas tan rigidas que su madre queria imponerle dentro de la cocina … y de la vida” “But she couldn't resist the temptation to transgress such rigid formulas as her mother wanted to impose on her inside the kitchen … and in her life” (200). And, indeed, it is through the ingredients (ingredientes) of her recipes that Tita is ultimately able to transgress or cross over (transgredir) the tyrannical rules set by her mother.

When Tita convalesces in the home of the family's doctor following her breakdown, she enjoys her first experience of leisure and an accompanying recognition of the oppression she has lived. Staring fixedly at her now free hands, which in their idleness she barely recognizes as her own, Tita recalls how a rigid schedule of work in the kitchen has dominated all her days.

Al lado de su madre, lo que sus manos tenian que hacer estaba friamente determinado, no habia dudas. Tenia que levantarse, vestirse, prender el fuego en la estufa, preparar el desayuno, alimentar a los animales, lavar los trastes, hacer las camas, preparar la comida, lavar los trastes, planchar la ropa, preparar la cena, lavar los trastes, dia tras dia, ano tras ano. (114)

At her mother's side, what her hands must do was coldly determined, there were no doubts. She had to get up, dress, light the fire in the stove, prepare breakfast, feed the animals, wash the dishes, make the beds, prepare dinner, wash the dishes, iron the clothes, prepare supper, wash the dishes, day after day, year after year.

Although in spite of this recognition Tita later bows to familial obligation and returns home to care for her infirm mother, when Rosaura announces that her daughter Esperanza will carry on the family tradition, Tita takes up the cause of her niece's freedom with the zeal of a crusader. The aunt willingly instructs Esperanza in culinary artistry, but also takes advantage of their hours together to provide Esperanza with “otro tipo de conocimientos de los que su madre le daba” “other kinds of knowledge than what her mother offered her” (238). Tita encourages her niece's intellectual curiosity and her right to decide her own destiny, and ensures that she attends school. Under Tita's dominion, then, the kitchen evolves as a space not only of domestic activity but of feminist rebellion. Esperanza comes to value the community and the creativity which the kitchen can foster, but as a result of Tita's rebellion, as an adult the niece enters the kitchen only when she chooses. Esperanza passes on to her daughter, the narrator, the legacy of Tita's embedded recipes but not the oppressive familial law.

In the last monthly installment, faithful to the norms of the folletin romance, Tita and Pedro are finally united, although contrary to most Catholic-oriented serial endings, not in wedlock.¹⁸ Instead, they find themselves “alone at last” when Tita's mother and Pedro's wife Rosaura die, victims of their own rejection of the social codes of the kitchen. Mama Elena perishes from a poisonous overdose of the emetic she takes to counteract the effects of the poison-laced food she believes Tita is preparing for her. Only after her death does Tita discover Mama Elena's letters from a forbidden romance with a mulatto. The man was murdered for their affair, during which Tita's sister Gertrudis was conceived. We can read Mama Elena's butcher-like mastery of the kitchen, then, as an angry response to the brutal imposition on her of societal conventions that forbade relations across racial and class lines. The recipe-sharing community consistently upsets these norms. Rosaura has rejected the society of the kitchen out of a desire for acceptance by “la crema y nata de Piedras Negras” “the cream of Piedras Negras society” (239). Her death, of obesity and flatulence, therefore, is an act of poetic justice. With all obstacles removed, Tita and Pedro abandon themselves to the erotic euphoria induced by the wedding banquet Tita prepares for Esperanza. Their flames of passion not only engulf the lovers but burn the entire ranch. Magically, Tita's culinary literary creation survives intact amid the rubble.

On the novel's last page the narrator, who, significantly, appears to be speaking to us from the kitchen as she prepares the novel's first recipe, informs readers that we have been reading her great aunt's recipe book cum autobiography. The narrator's conclusion, that Tita will continue to live on as long as there is someone to prepare her recipes, constitutes an invitation to turn back, like the narrator, to the first chapter to read and prepare its recipe. In the process, Tita's story has revealed, the heirs of her recipes should make them their own, with the addition of their own stories. This ending offers an invitation to create, highlighting the recipe-sharing community in the folletinesque love story.

If Esquivel delights in imitating the contemporary serial romance, her pleasure derives in part from subverting its conventions, including the norm of ending with an opulent Catholic wedding, an exaggerated fascination with appearances measured in material abundance and a tendency to segregate characters according to race and class (Erhart 96-101). However, this novel hardly represents a denunciation of the folletin romance. More probably Esquivel chooses to mimic this fictional form, typical of women's magazines, which generally include recipes, because of her greater fascination with the creative possibilities of the discourse of recipes. In the process of inventing this recipe-sharing community, Esquivel's work displays its sharpest divergence from serialized fiction where “what is crucially missing … is any form of female solidarity.”¹⁹

The female community of the kitchen in Como agua para chocolate may reflect women's propensity to define their identity more relationally than men, as suggested by Nancy Chodorow.²⁰ Yet, solidarity among Mexican women has historically been very difficult. Cherrie Moraga points to the perpetuation of the myth of la Malinche, the Indian woman accused of betraying her people by becoming Cortes' lover, to illustrate how women are encouraged to abandon one another in their search for male approval.²¹ This tendency is all the more pervasive in popular Latin American fictional forms like the serial romance and the novela rosa. Therefore, although Como agua para chocolate remains undeniably and unapologetically a romance, the creation in it of a community of women that defies these norms is of particular significance. Moreover, as has been observed reprovingly by the reviewer who criticized in Esquivel's novel an aspiration to novelty, “Los personajes femeninos ocupan el primer plano de la novela” “The female characters occupy the foreground in the novel,” and “En Como agua para chocolate la presencia masculina es secundaria” “In Como agua para chocolate the masculine presence is secondary” (Marquet 65-66). By locating the centric space of the novel in the kitchen, a primarily female setting, Esquivel has created an environment which promotes creative female community.

This is not to suggest that the novel supports a return of Mexican women to this domestic sphere, or that it should remain an exclusively female domain. The novel's title refers to a woman's anger at domestic imprisonment. Also, on repeated occasions in the novel men seem enticed to work in the kitchen. More tellingly, the fact that Tita's diary with her recipes emerges whole from the rubble of the ranch symbolizes both the liberation of the female artist from the oblivion of domesticity and the elimination of the patriarchal codes imaged by the ranch under the repressed and repressive dominion of Mama Elena. Key to the novelty of Como agua para chocolate is that the protagonist steps outside the kitchen without renouncing the creative force it embodies.

Yet this work also indicates that only after a woman is no longer confined to the space of the kitchen can she publicly celebrate its life. Tita, writing during the mythical time of the Mexican Revolution, records her recipes in her diary, but it remains in that private form until her grand-niece, the narrator, rewrites the diary and recipes as a novel. Sor Juana, an exception among women in the seventeenth century, can indulge in the pleasures of kitchen phenomena, because, as she proudly reminds an admiring poet in a romance, she is not forced to work there:

Gracias a Dios, que ya no he de moler Chocolate, ni me ha de moler a mi quien viniere a visitarme.²²

Thanks be to God, that no longer do I have to beat Chocolate, nor must I be harassed by anyone who might visit me.

Writing in 1971, Rosario Castellanos felt compelled to denounce the perception that women's domain is the kitchen, because at that time under twenty percent of women worked in the paid labor force in Mexico and most who did performed jobs which they also performed at home.²³ Furthermore, official recognition of literature by women in Spanish America remained an anomaly. As the contributions of male and female Hispanic American authors today become more equally represented, the challenge to speak to the great diversity of female experience opens the doors for new recipes for writing.

In answer to this appeal, Esquivel offers a liberating vision of a denigrated experience of “dailiness” in many women's lives.²⁴ In Como agua para chocolate, although repressive societal traditions appear to dominate Tita's life, the specific manner of preparing a recipe actually determines the lives and destinies of the characters. Perhaps the suspicions of the seventeenth-century Dominican friar about the subversive goals of women in the kitchen were justified. By bestowing such transformative power on the creativity of the artist in the kitchen and by converting the creative metaphors of the kitchen into a narrative method, Esquivel answers Patricia Elena Gonzalez' metaphoric call to take up the weapons of the kitchen and start cooking, with a novel recipe for writing. Her work also suggests that the number and variety of possible recipes is infinite. The ingredients for this recipe include a recipe-sharing community, like Tita and her grand-niece whose voices unite to create the work we read; a kitchen, like the room for creative expression described long ago by Virginia Woolf; and the capacity for invention, which Helena Maria Viramontes finds in her mother's nopalitos. As for the “Manera de hacerse” “Method of preparation,” as Rosario Ferre expresses it:

Lo importante es aplicar esa leccion fundamental que aprendimos de nuestras madres, las primeras, despues de todo, en ensenarnos a bregar con fuego: el secreto de la escritura, como el de la buena cocina, no tiene absolutamente nada que ver con el sexo, sino con la sabiduria con que se combinan los ingredientes.

The important thing is to apply that fundamental lesson that we learned from our mothers, the first, after all, to teach us how to deal with fire; the secret of writing, like that of good cooking, has absolutely nothing to do with sex, but with the wisdom with which one mixes the ingredients.

(33)

Notes

1. This comical coda is from a seventeenth-century Dominican friar's anecdote that the women of Chiapas, Mexico eliminated an autocratic bishop by poisoning his chocolate. Thomas Gage, The English-American: A New Survey of the West Indies, 1648 (London: Routledge, 1946) 163.

2. Margaret Sayers Peden, trans., A Woman of Genius: The Intellectual Autobiography of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (Salisbury: Lime Rock Press, 1987) 62.

3. Rosario Castellanos, “Cooking Lesson,” A Rosario Castellanos Reader, ed. Maureen Ahern (Austin: UT Press, 1988) 207.

4. Jean Franco, Plotting Women (New York: Columbia UP, 1989) 186.

5. Laura Esquivel, Como agua para chocolate (Novela de entregas mensuales con recetas, amores y remedios caseros) (Mexico: Planeta, 1989) 13.

6. Antonio Marquet, “La receta de Laura Esquivel,” Plural 237 (1991) 58.

7. In his novel Hopscotch, Julio Cortazar opposes the naive lector-hembra or “female-reader” who seeks pleasing plots and happy endings to the sophisticated “reader-accomplice.” Julio Cortazar, Hopscotch (New York: Random House, 1966) 397-98.

8. Patricia Elena Gonzalez and Eliana Ortega, eds., La sarten por el mango (Rio Piedras, P.R.: Huracan, 1985) 17.

9. Rosario Ferre, “La cocina de la escritura,” Sitio a Eros (Mexico: Joaquin Mortiz, 1986) 13-33.

10. Rosario Ferre, “El collar de camandulas,” Papeles de Pandora (Mexico: Joaquin Mortiz, 1979) 122-33.

11. Barbara Smith, “A Press of Our Own: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies 10 (1989) 11.

12. Helena Maria Viramontes, “‘Nopalitos’: The Making of Fiction,” Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo caras, Gloria Anzaldua, ed. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1990) 192.

13. See Francisco J. Santamaria, Diccionario de mejicanismos, 2nd ed. (Mexico: Porrua, 1974) 37.

14. For a highly critical description of the folletin romance genre popular especially among female readers in Mexico, see Rosario Castellanos, “Corin Tellado: Un caso tipico,” Mujer que sabe latin (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1984) 142-43.

15. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1989) 66-67.

16. Susan J. Leonardi, “Recipes for Reading: Summer Pasta, Lobster a la Riseholme, and Key Lime Pie,” PMLA 104 (1989) 340.

17. Paule Marshall, “From the Poets in the Kitchen,” Reena and Other Stories (Old Westbury: Feminist Press, 1983) 6.

18. See Virginia Erhart, “Amor, ideologia y enmascaramiento en Corin Tellado,” Casa de las Americas 77 (1973) 95-96.

19. Jean Franco, “The Incorporation of Women: A Comparison of North American and Mexican Popular Narrative,” Studies in Entertainment, ed. Tania Modleski (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986) 137.

20. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: U of California P, 1978) 205-209.

21. Cherrie Moraga, “From a Long Line of Vendidas: Chicanas and Feminism,” Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986) 173-89.

22. Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Obras completas (Mexico: Porrua, 1985) 67.

23. Mary Elmendorf, “Mexico: The Many Worlds of Women,” Women: Roles and Status in Eight Countries, eds. Janet Zollinger Giele, Audrey Chapman Smock (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1977) 146-47.

24. Susanne Juhasz, “Towards a Theory of Form in Feminist Autobiography: Kate Millett's Flying and Sita; Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior,” Women's Autobiography: Essays in Criticism, ed. Estelle C. Jelinek (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980) 223-24.