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In this intensely personal and enchanting bestselling novel set during the Mexican revolution at the turn of the twentieth century, Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate tells the story of Tita De La Garza, the youngest daughter of a Mexican family. It is a love story at heart, richly woven with themes of sexuality, repression, tradition, rebellion, authority, and liberty. And attachment. Relational dynamics abound and revolve around food, cooking, and consuming. Each of the twelve chapters follows the months of the year and also contains one of Tita's recipes, which she prepares within the chapter itself: a recipe book and a novel.
I first read this delicious book in the mid-nineties. Whilst I thoroughly enjoyed it back then, my recent re-reading has provided a much richer experience. Now, as an attachment-informed psychologist with an ever-increasing curiosity towards our relationships with food, this book was more mouth-watering than ever. Here, I aim to peer at it through the lens of attachment and psychotherapy.
The protagonist, Tita, has a strong bond with food and the kitchen, even before she is born:
Tita was so sensitive to onions, any time they were being chopped, they say she would just cry and cry; when she was still in my great-grandmother's belly her sobs were so loud that even Nacha, the cook, who was half-deaf, could hear them easily. Once her wailing got so violent that it brought on an early labour. (p. 9)
Tita emerges from the warmth of Mama Elena's womb to the warmth of the kitchen on a wave of her own tears, which are subsequently used to flavour the family meals:
That afternoon, when the uproar had subsided and the water had been dried up by the sun, Nacha swept up the residue the tears had left on the red stone floor. There was enough salt to fill a ten-pound sack—it was used for cooking and lasted a long time. Thanks to her unusual birth, Tita felt a deep love for the kitchen where she spent most of her