SOURCE: “On Recipes, Reading and Revolution: Postboom Parody in Como agua para chocolate,¹” in Hispanic Review, Vol. 63, No. 2, Spring, 1995, pp. 133–46.

In the following essay, Ibsen explains that Como agua para chocolate is not feminine literature as much as it is a parody of male-orientated literature.

Despite its popularity with the reading public, initial critical reaction to Laura Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate (1989) has often tended to dismiss the work as, at best, a poor imitation of the male canon. Probably the most extreme reaction thus far has been Antonio Marquet's analysis, which characterizes the novel as “simplista … infantil … plagada de convencionalismos banales, despojada de una intención estilística definida y … [sin] otra aspiración que ser novedosa” (58). Closer to the mainstream of critical response, George McMurray considers the book “worthy of note,” although, he contends, the episodes of magic realism “never would have been written without...