The Politics of Responsive Cookbooks: Counter Gastronomy Collectibles in Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate

Abstract

This essay examines the politics of counter cookbooks whose role shifts from receptacles to
responses that mobilize revolutionary culinary spaces in the war narrative of Laura Esquivel’s
Like Water for Chocolate (1989). In particular, the essay redirects the main theories and
critiques that have been established and espoused in culinary studies. In this reading of Like
Water for Chocolate, a cross-cultural intervention in the existing scholarship on domestic
spatiality and female identity is addressed. Esquivel’s narrative features provisioning
collectibles that encode the mobility of the kitchen as a repository of women’s counter-discourses
that not only reverse but also chaotically recreate the structured conceptions in the master war
narratives. The kitchen in Esquivel’s narrative compiles cryptic scrapbooks of recipes whose
technologies of knowledge are either decoded or re-inscribed from one generation to another.
Arguably, women’s transgenerational gastronomic writings function as intersemiotic artefacts
that activate performative subject positions in gendered households and varied social contexts
that reflect the dominant power dynamics. So, Like Water for Chocolate decentralizes the
impact of external wars, as it curates recipes that are ekphrazeined and recreated in foodways
that empower individuals, galvanize new alliances, and decolonize female relations from the
national/international ideologies of warscapes, cultural signifiers, and collective memory. The
essay incorporates Homi Bhabha’s theory on the relation between the codification of history and
the art of collecting to examine the discursive relations between food and power. Ultimately,
this study revisits the complex dynamics of foodways as narrative functions, especially in
relation to social inequalities and justice as portrayed through literature and cultural narratives.