Eating Up "Like Water for Chocolate" Quiz

Answer: A Novel in Monthly Installments with Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies

The subtitle and the structure of Esquivel's novel reflect the inspiration of women's magazines of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with a mix of recipes, household hints, romantic fiction, and personal stories from women's lives. The novel takes more than a few steps across the line into eroticism, however, and even the recipes are over the top. Martha Stewart this is not.

The line "A Mystical Mexican Love Story..." comes from a "USA Today" blurb on the cover of the paperback edition that I am using: First Anchor Books Edition, 1995. (The novel was first published in 1989.) "The Bubbling Passion..." phrase comes from the Wikipedia article on the book. "Love in the Time of Cholera" is a novel by Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Answer: Place a bit of the onion on top of your head.

The reader realizes right away that she is in the realm of fantasy, superstition, or "magical realism" when told that Tita could be heard sobbing in the womb and was born in the kitchen when her mother's water broke, her early labor brought on by the crying of the unborn baby, caused by the onions.

This also lets us know that Tita, the great-aunt of the narrator, is a person whose intense emotions can have physical effects. The January chapter begins the pattern that continues throughout the book, using the month for a title, and starting with a recipe that includes sardines, chorizo sausage, onion, oregano, chilies, and hard rolls.

Answer: As the youngest daughter, Tita will have to take care of her mother until she dies.

The plot of Laura Esquivel's novel "Like Water for Chocolate" is driven by Mama Elena's insistence that the tradition of the youngest caring for the mother until she dies be carried out at the expense of her daughter Tita's romantic love for her young neighbor Pedro, and his passionate desire for her.

When Pedro and his father come to ask for Tita's hand in marriage, Mama Elena offers Tita's older sister Rosaura instead, at which the servant Chencha (who eavesdrops) later exclaims, "You can't just switch tacos and enchiladas like that!" Later, Tita learns the story behind her mother's bitterness and truly weeps for her at her funeral, vowing never to renounce love as Mama Elena had done.

Answer: Tita's tears

Throughout Laura Esquivel's "Like Water for Chocolate" the emotions of the cook affects the very substance of the food and those who eat it, and this effect is completely out of the cook's control. Tita does not intend the cake to cause all of their guests to weep and vomit, but her sexual frustration and suppressed rage goes into the food and is too much to bear for the human bodies that consume it.

This connection between food and passion is especially true in the March chapter, in which the "Quail in Rose Petal Sauce" made from flowers given to Tita by a still passionate Pedro (a year after his marriage to her sister Rosaura) has a profound effect on those who eat it, especially Tita's other sister, Gertrudis.

Answer: The outbuilding the shower is in catches on fire and she runs away naked on horseback with a soldier.

The March chapter, when Gertrudis rides away naked on horseback - "face to face" - with one of Pancho Villa's soldiers, may be at the same time the most erotic and the most outrageous scene in the novel. The soldier, Juan, has been guided by the scent of roses emanating from the (literally) hot body of Gertrudis.

The situation is so outrageous that the clichés of smarmy romantic fiction are hilarious without dulling the sexiness of the scene at all. We are also told that this is the first time Pedro - married for over a year to the repressed and thoroughly unattractive Rosaura - has ever seen a naked woman. Gertrudis becomes a soldadera (a female soldier) in Pancho Villa's army, and Tita begins writing her cookbook that night.

Answer: A bedspread

We learn of the bedspread Tita is crocheting in the first chapter, when she thinks she will be able to marry Pedro, and we watch it grow as the novel proceeds. She begins her cookbook after Gertrudis leaves, and adds a bit more to her bedspread that night.

At one point we see her fold it three ways. When Tita has a mental breakdown because Pedro and Rosaura have moved away with their baby, making it impossible for Tita to continue breast feeding him, the bedspread is taken with Tita as she goes to stay with the doctor, John Brown.

When Chencha tosses it to her, the bedspread is "so large and heavy it didn't fit inside the carriage. Tita grabbed it so tightly that there was no choice but to let it drag behind the carriage like the huge train of a wedding gown that stretched for a full kilometer." By the end of the novel, "It covered the whole ranch, all three hectares." Now that's a big spread.

Answer: A box of matches

I have to admit that this image is so ludicrous that it breaks the spell for me. I was rooting for the faithful, intelligent, generous love of Dr. John Brown to win out over the immature, selfish, romantic obsession of Pedro. But it is John who gives a box of matches to Tita at the wedding of his son and her niece, the eventual parents of the narrator of the novel we are reading.

When Pedro dies, Tita ignites their bodies, the symbolic bedspread, and the whole ranch by swallowing the matches, leaving only the cookbook in the ashes.

There, now I've spoiled it all.

Answer: Mama Elena had a lover whose mother had been of African descent.

After Mama Elena's death, Tita had found love letters from a man in a box under her mother's bed that revealed the secret. Elena had become pregnant by a man she loved deeply, but her parents would not allow the marriage because his mother had been a "Negress" and instead forced her into a marriage with Juan de la Garza, Tita and Rosaura's father. Someone had revealed the gossip to Mama Elena's husband on the night Tita was born, and he died of a heart attack as a result.

Therefore, Gertrudis had some African ancestry, explaining her child's appearance.

Answer: Esperanza

Instead of Josefita, Tita's name, the baby is given the name Esperanza, which means "hope" in Spanish. Tita does not want to curse the child with her name and a life of barrenness and frustration like her own. (Pedro and Rosaura's first child, a son, died primarily because he was separated from Tita.) That Rosaura plans a similar fate for her daughter as Mama Elena planned for Tita is revealed when young Alex, the son of Dr. John Brown, tells Esperanza he wants to marry her when they grow up. Rosaura is described several times as planning to have her daughter take care of her until death, and the reader is relieved when Rosaura dies of her awful (food-related) illness.

Answer: Nacha, John's Kickapu grandmother, and Mama Elena

The cook, Nacha, is a warm, mothering figure for Tita, providing the care and wisdom Mama Elena cannot or will not give, and she continues to be a presence in the novel after her death immediately after she and Tita prepare the wedding meal for Rosaura and Pedro.

The ghost of Dr. John Brown's Native American grandmother, who was from the Kickapu tribe, nurtures Tita back to sanity after her nephew dies, gradually giving way to the living man, John, whose methods as a physician derive from her teachings. Mama Elena appears after Pedro and Tita have sex for the first time, tormenting Tita until she finally stands up to her and declares her independence. Tita thinks she is carrying Pedro's child, but realizes she is not pregnant when she finally releases her rage at the ghost of her mother: "I know who I am! I am a person who has a perfect right to live her life as she pleases. Once and for all, leave me alone; I won't put up with you!"