That night, Tita comes home to find Nacha dead, clutching a photo of her late fiancée, whom Mama Elena’s mother had sent away. Tita, unbeknownst to herself, magically infused the cake with her repressed sadness. During the reception, everyone who eats the cake is overcome with heartbreak and sick stomachs, except for Tita.

In the receiving line after the ceremony, Pedro whispers to Tita that he is only marrying Rosaura to be closer to Tita. On the night before the wedding, Tita’s tears fall into the cake batter and icing. She remembers when she first met Pedro the year before at a holiday party, where he declared that he would love her forever. That night, feeling chilled and devastated, Tita continues to crochet the wedding bedspread she had secretly been making for her potential wedding with Pedro. When Pedro comes to ask for Tita’s hand, Mama Elena offers to let him marry her older daughter Rosaura instead, and Pedro agrees. Mama Elena angrily reminds Tita of the family tradition demanding the youngest daughter stay at home and care for her mother (until the mother’s death) instead of getting married. One holiday season when Tita is fifteen years old, she tells Mama Elena that a suitor, Pedro Musquiz, wants to come speak to her. Mama Elena must manage the ranch, so she leaves Tita’s care to Nacha, the cook, whom Tita comes to see as her “real mother.” Unlike her older sisters, Gertrudis and Rosaura, Tita develops a deep love of cooking. Two days after her birth, her father, Juan de la Garza, dies of a heart attack.

Her tears send “Mama Elena” into labor, and Tita is born on the kitchen table. Each chapter begins with a recipe in Tita’s cookbook, which has been inherited by the story’s narrator, Tita’s great-niece.īefore Tita’s birth, she cries in the womb while her mother, Elena de la Garza, is chopping onions. Like Water for Chocolate is set in Northern Mexico during the Mexican Revolution, from about 1910-1920.

Like water for chocolate book