Summary of The Film Like Water for Chocolate

In Mexico, water instead of milk was used to make hot chocolate. Water is first heated up to boil, hot enough to easily melt chocolate that is dipped in. Similarly, in the film Like Water for Chocolate, the characters become heated up and take bubbling actions that build up due to moments of arousal or passion. The story though centers on Tita De la Garza, the youngest daughter of a Mexican family and whose knowledge and understanding of life was limited by her life in the kitchen of the family’s ranch. As she was practically born and raised in the kitchen, she was taught by her mother-figure and culinary mentor Nacha to become a very skilled and talented cook.

However, outside of cooking, she had barely any freedom. Under the pressure of her fearsome mother Elena, Tita was forbidden to marry and forced to always stay by and take care of her mother. In Mama Elena’s eyes, this was the duty of her youngest daughter, whereas the other daughters must marry and continue the family line. Because Tita could not speak out her mind as it was not allowed by her mother, food became her emotional outlet, which led the people who consume her food to go through a sensual experience galvanized by such emotions. Two senses that greatly made such impacts were Tita’s pain and love.

Throughout the film, family and freedom have been two driving themes that were expressed deeply but also against one another. Tita’s expectations as the youngest daughter almost always restricted her freedom to act and speak on her own. Family is of course tied by marriages, blood, or adoption but usually bonded by the love expressed for one another. As for the De la Garza family, “family” has been the main source of Tita’s pain and suffering. Tita was not allowed to marry nor allowed to be in a relationship driven by philia, but that did not stop her from falling in love with Pedro Muzquiz. Pedro did very much love Tita first, but Mama Elena forbade them to marry and instead had her eldest daughter Rosaura marry Pedro instead. Although he only agreed to marry Rosaura to stay close to Tita, Tita still felt great pain from such heartbreak.

This emotion took over while she prepared the Chabela wedding cake for Pedro and Rosaura’s wedding feast. Tita and Nacha shared the burden of cooking for the feast that required overwhelming amounts of food. Although Tita was already grieving about her situation, Mama Elena disregarded her feelings and sternly ordered Tita to get over it and focus on cooking. Instead of showing love or care as expected of typical families, her mother and oldest sister, who knew about Tita’s love for Pedro but still agreed to take Pedro as her own husband, brought emotional pain towards Tita. When Mama Elena departs to sleep, leaving Tita and Nacha alone in the kitchen, Nacha urges Tita to vent out her emotions now before the wedding. In the absence of her family, Tita gains freedom to express herself, even for a little bit. She finally cries profusely, all the while her tears falling into the cake batter. The tears not only made the cake batter a bit soggy but also induced relentless vomiting and a dreadful sense of loss among the wedding guests who ate a slice. Through cooking, which is the only freedom she really had to express herself, Tita, for a moment, clandestinely broke away from her chains of family duties to let out the pain that she felt in her heart.

This freedom, or rather the desire for freedom, has challenged Tita to express her sense of love in atypical ways while combating the boundaries placed around her. After the death of Mama Elena’s husband Juan De La Garza, Tita’s fate was sealed and controlled by Mama Elena. Nevertheless, cooking always came around to be her remedy. She had to cook for others many times over, but she generally had the freedom to cook whatever she wanted. Mama Elena though did test out an opportunity to lessen Tita’s freedom in cooking when Rosaura decided to cook for one meal, ultimately competing against Tita in front of Pedro. Although Rosaura’s dishes caused everyone to have stomachaches, Tita’s freedom in cooking was not able to be stripped away from Tita. In Jon Holtzman’s Remembering Bad Cooks: Sensuality, Memory, Personhood, he particularly emphases on “the neglected area of bad cooking, and what sorts of messages a putatively bad-tasting dish is supposed… to convey about the person who cooked it”. Rosaura’s dishes were undoubtedly worse than what Tita usually cooks. This however presents Rosaura in a different and negative light: Rosaura is not a cook that the family can rely on nor would she be able to provide ample nor delicious meals for the family that Rosaura and Pedro are soon to build. Conversely, this shines a much more positive light for Tita: everyone, including Mama Elena, agrees that Tita is the talented cook of the family, and Pedro realizes this even more and thus falls even more for Tita. Jon Holtzman’s main concern is to bring about “questions about the way in which the sensuality of food serves to structure social relations and identities, particularly in regard to gender…In what ways does the sensuality of food shape how we understand and remember those people who prepare food, the cooks?”. Based on the meal prepared by Rosaura, sensuality of food very much shapes the status of cook. Because Rosaura cooked terribly, she loses respect from those who ate as she was a woman who had no skills in the kitchen. Because Tita clearly cooks much better and much more tasteful meals, she is respected and appointed as the official cook, even to those who do not want to admit it. For this family, a woman who can cook can provide for the family, and, if she cannot, then she fails her duties.

As the full responsibility of cooking returns to Tita, she is still able to maintain the small portion of freedom. Every other part of Tita’s life was under Mama Elena’s rule, and, even when Tita received roses from Pedro, Mama Elena right away told her to get rid of them, not giving Tita the time of day to appreciate this sweet gesture. Mama Elena does not see Tita as a whole person but rather the daughter whose purpose in life is to just care for her. In Janet Carsten’s The Substance of Kinship and the Heat of the Hearth: Feeding, Personhood, and Relatedness among Malays in Pulau Langkawi, she studies “how, for Malays on the island of Langkawi, feeding (in the sense of receiving as well as giving nourishment) is a vital component in the long process of becoming a person and participating fully in social relations” (Carsten, page 223). Interestingly, Tita uses cooking to actually be a person who can somewhat, if not fully, take part in social relations. Mama Elena has no control over the sensuous possibilities that the meals may inherent. Therefore, instead of entirely getting rid of the flowers and rather wanting to respond to Pedro’s affection discreetly, Tita used the rose petals and quail to create a dish of sexual appetite. “Food creates both persons in a physical sense and the substance – blood – by which they are related to each other. Personhood, relatedness, and feeling are intimately connected”. With each bite that he took, Pedro could feel as though Tita was covering and piercing him through the tastes and textures of the dish. Though they are not physically in contact, through the dish, they become so intimately connected, being filled with the emotions they have one another. Gertrudis the middle sibling among the sisters was the most affected by the dish: she felt so hot with a rush of sexual desire that, when she tried to take a shower, the water would just evaporate before even touching her. The sexual desire emitted from her in the form of a rose-scented mist that traveled to Juan Alejandrez the captain of the rebel forces, who followed the mist to the source and swept Gertrudis off her feet to make love to her as his horse galloped from the ranch. She was so affected by the sexual feelings that Tita embedded into the dish that Gertrude could not resist the temptations for intimacy.

Tita eventually escaped the chains of the ranch, became a fully free woman, and return home to live her life as she wanted. Regardless, she had such a tough journey to get to that point ever since she was born in the kitchen. With little to no freedom nor any opportunity to be a whole and real person, she implemented her skills in cooking to express her feelings, especially pain and love, discreetly yet in full effect. Through the flavors and textures of the meals she prepared, many senses can be expressed uniquely. Because Tita’s skills have been sharpened every day in the kitchen in her life, Tita’s cooking really had her heart and soul poured and battered into it.

Works Cited

• Carsten, Janet. “The Substance of Kinship and the Heat of the Hearth: Feeding, Personhood, and Relatedness among Malays in Pulau Langkawi.” American Ethnologist, vol. 22, no. 2, 1995, pp. 235–243., doi:10.1525/ae.1995.22.2.02a00010.
• Holtzman, Jon. “Remembering Bad Cooks.” The Senses and Society, vol. 5, no. 2, 2010, pp. 223–241., doi:10.2752/174589210x12668381452881.
• Arau, Alfonso, director. Like Water for Chocolate. Netflix, https://www.netflix.com/watch/701346?trackId=14277281&tctx=0,0,f4176383-dbac-4d89-99fd-c523ce07c4fa-104438642