SOURCE: “Hispanic American Women Writers' Novel Recipes and Laura Esquivel's Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate),” in Women's Studies, Vol. 22, No. 2, 1993, pp. 217–30.

In the following essay, Jaffe examines the community-like qualities of recipe sharing and the empowerment women can obtain from the kitchen.

The women of this city are somewhat light in their carriage, and have learned from the Devil many enticing lessons and baits to draw poor souls to sin and damnation; and if they cannot have their wills, they will surely work revenge either by chocolate or conserves, or some fair present, which shall surely carry death along with it.¹

During the same era that inspired the suspicion of women’s activities in the kitchen cited in my epigraph, the Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz boldly celebrates the phenomena of the kitchen as worthy of philosophical observation:

And what shall...