Like Water for Chocolate

I'd been saving this book to read while I was in Mexico over New Year's. Then it was so short and so good that I ended up finishing it almost before we arrived.

Like Water for Chocolate is part cookbook, part romance, part family epic. It centers on Tita. As the youngest daughter, she's destined to remain single and care for her mother for her entire life. When she falls in love, her mother does everything in her power to prevent the two from getting together, leading to much strife and drama. But Tita is the family cook, and her emotions come spilling out in her food, like The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake in reverse.

Everything in this book was heightened, from the emotion to the conflicts. It was no surprise that this all occasionally erupted in magical displays. But it also all stayed grounded through the traditional recipes that Tita prepared for her family. Those recipes are woven in in a way that makes you think you just might be able to replicate them. But then the mole recipe tells you to start feeding walnuts to the turkey fifteen days before you kill it, and you despair of ever tasting anything like this food. It helps add to the magic, though, that these tastes feel beyond what's possible

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