At 16, Tita falls in love with her neighbor, Pedro, but when he asks for her hand in marriage, Mama Elena forbids it, claiming Tita must fulfill the family tradition of the youngest daughter staying home and caring for her mother. Tita displays a talent for culinary arts from an early age and soon finds the kitchen a place of refuge from Mama Elena’s temperamental moods. Nacha nourishes Tita with gruel and tea but also instills in the child a love of cooking. Tita’s father dies of a heart attack just after her birth and her mother, Mama Elena, cannot nurse, Tita is charged to Nacha, the family’s octogenarian cook. Josefita “Tita” De la Garza is born crying as her mother chops onions in the kitchen of their family ranch in Mexico. The novel is set in a northern Mexican village near the border during the Mexican Revolution, which took place in 1910-1920. Esquivel frames each month with a family recipe, which is worked into the chapter’s plot or themes. Like Water for Chocolate contains 12 chapters, one for each month of the year, though the timeline spans several decades. Content Warning: Like Water for Chocolate contains sensitive material such as depictions of physical abuse and sexual assault.
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