SOURCE: “Spanish American Women Writers: Simmering Identity over a Low Fire,” in Studies in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 20, No. 1, Winter, 1996, pp. 147-65.

In the following essay, Bilbija examines the exploration of Latin-American identity through the use of kitchen and alchemy metaphors in the fiction of such authors as Laura Esquivel and Silvia Plager.

“… for example, food is to be eaten; but it also serves to signify (conditions, circumstances, tastes); food is therefore a signifying system, and must one day be described as such.”

—Roland Barthes, Critical Essays

“One man's cookbook is another woman's soft porn.”

—Margaret Atwood “Introducing The CanLit Foodbook”

When Virginia Woolf argues in A Room of One's Own for an appropriate and pertinent place for a woman, she never mentions the kitchen as a possible space in which her intellectual liberation from the patriarchal system could be enacted.¹ At first glance, this area had always...