Only Cauldrons Know the Secrets of Their Soups

Abstract

Shortly after its publication in 1989, Laura Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate (translated as Like Water for Chocolate in 1992) garnered international acclaim in Latin America, the United States, Europe, and Asia. Like the book, the romance novel’s film version,1 with a screenplay by the author, received eleven Ariel Awards from the Mexican Academy of Motion Pictures, becoming the largest-grossing foreign film ever released in the United States, to be superseded only recently by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). In 1994, Like Water won the prestigious ABBY Award,2 and was subsequently translated into thirty-eight languages. The subsequent flurry of novels on women and food bespeak Like Water’s powerful influence: Lora Brody’s Cooking Memories: Recipes and Recollections (1989), Jyl Lynn Felman’s Hot Chicken Wings (1992) and Cravings: A Sensual Memoir (1997), Gabriella De Ferrari’s Gringa Latina: A Woman of Two Worlds (1995), Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices (1997), Pat Mora’s House of Houses (1997), Ntozake Shange’s If I Can Cook/You Know God Can (1998), Mei Ng’s Eating Chinese Food Naked: A Novel (1998), Joanne Harris’s Chocolat: A Novel (1999), Madeline Gallego Thorpe and Mary Tate Engel’s Corazon Contento: Sonoran Recipes and Stories from the Heart (1999), Ana Castillo’s Peel My Love Like an Onion: A Novel (1999), Betty Harper Fussell’s My Kitchen Wars (1999), Karen Stolz’s World of Pies: A Novel (2000), and James Runcie’s The Discovery of Chocolate: A Novel (2001).