SOURCE: “Cooking, Community, Culture: A Reading of Like Water for Chocolate,” in Recipes for Reading: Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories, University of Massachusetts Press, 1997, pp. 216–35.

In the following essay, Lawless claims that Like Water for Chocolate can not be easily classified as simply a novel or simply a cookbook; it contains the elements of both genres. Lawless gives detailed examples of this genre blending.

Laura Esquivel has written an unclassifiable work that simultaneously breaks and brings together boundaries of genre so as to concoct something new in Mexican literature. Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments with Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies, or in the original Spanish, Como agua para chocolate: Novela de entregas mensuales con recetas, amores y remedios caseros¹ is a mixture of community recipe book, how-to household book, socio-political and historical documentation of the Mexican Revolution, psychological study of male/female as well as...