The book is divided into twelve sections named after the months of the year, starting with January. Each section begins with a Mexican recipe. The chapters outline the preparation of the dish and ties it to an event in the protagonist's life.
Tita de la Garza, the novel's main protagonist, is fifteen at the start of the story, which takes place during the Mexican Revolution. She lives with her mother, Mama Elena, and her older sisters Gertrudis and Rosaura, on a ranch near the Mexico – US border.
Pedro is a neighbor and another main protagonist whom Tita falls in love with at first sight. He asks Mama Elena for Tita’s hand in marriage, but Mama Elena forbids it, citing the De la Garza family tradition which demands that the youngest daughter (in this case Tita) must remain unmarried and take care of her mother until her mother's death. Mama Elena offers for Pedro to marry Rosaura instead. Pedro reluctantly accepts and marries Tita's older sister, Rosaura. Tita can hardly keep from grieving, despite Pedro’s assurance that it is Tita he loves and not Rosaura, and that he only married Rosaura to be closer to Tita.
Tita has a love of the kitchen and a deep connection with food, a skill enhanced by the fact that the family cook was her primary caretaker as Tita grew up. Her love for cooking also comes from the fact that she was born in the kitchen. In contrast, Rosaura's cooking skills are poor, making her less attractive to her husband Pedro. Despite this, he and Rosaura have a son, Roberto. Rosaura is unable to nurse Roberto, so Tita brings Roberto to her breast to stop the baby from crying. Miraculously, Tita begins to produce breast milk and is able to nurse the baby. This draws her and Pedro closer than ever. They begin meeting secretly, snatching their few times together by sneaking around the ranch and behind the backs of Mama Elena and Rosaura.
Tita’s strong emotions become infused into her cooking and she unintentionally begins to affect the people around her through the food she prepares. After one particularly rich meal of quail in rose petal sauce flavored with Tita’s erotic thoughts of Pedro, Tita's older sister Gertrudis becomes inflamed with lust and leaves the ranch making ravenous love with a revolutionary soldier on the back of a horse before being dumped in a brothel and subsequently disowned by her mother.
Rosaura and Pedro are forced to leave for San Antonio, Texas, at the urging of Mama Elena, who suspects a relationship between Tita and Pedro. Rosaura loses her son Roberto and is later made sterile from complications with the birth of her daughter Esperanza.
Upon learning the news of her nephew's death, whom she cared for herself, Tita blames her mother. Mama Elena responds by smacking Tita across the face with a wooden spoon. Tita, unwilling to cope with her mother's controlling ways, secludes herself in the dovecote until the sympathetic Dr. John Brown reasons with her and convinces her to calm down. Mama Elena clearly states that there is no place for "lunatics" like Tita on the farm, and wants her to be institutionalized. However, the doctor decides to take care of Tita at his home instead. Tita develops a close relationship with Dr. Brown, even planning to marry him at one point, but her underlying feelings for Pedro do not waver.
While John is away, Tita loses her virginity to Pedro. A month later, Tita is worried about whether or not she is pregnant with Pedro’s child. Gertrudis, Tita’s other older sister, visits the ranch for a special holiday and makes Pedro overhear about Tita’s pregnancy, causing Tita and Pedro to argue about running away together. This causes Pedro to get drunk and sing below Tita’s window while she is arguing with Mama Elena’s ghost and finds out from her she isn’t pregnant. Mama Elena gets revenge on Tita by setting Pedro on fire, leaving him bedridden and behaving like “a child throwing a tantrum”.Meanwhile, Tita is preparing for the return of her fiance, John, and is hesitant to tell him that she cannot marry him because she is no longer a virgin. Rosaura comes to the kitchen while Tita is cooking and argues with her about over Tita's involvement with Rosaura’s daughter Esperenza’s life and the tradition of the youngest daughter remaining at home to care for the mother until she dies, a tradition which Tita despises. John and his deaf great-aunt comes over and Tita tells him that she cannot marry him. John seems to accept it, “reaching for Tita’s hand...with a smile on his face”.
Many years later, Tita is preparing for Esperenza’s and Alex’s wedding to one another, now that Rosaura has died from digestive problems. During the wedding, Pedro proposes to Tita saying that he does not want to “die without making [Tita] [his] wife”.Tita accepts and Pedro dies having sex with her in the kitchen storage room right after the wedding. Tita is overcome with sorrow and tries to kill herself by eating maches.The candles are sparked by the heat of his memory, creating a consuming fire that engulfs them both, leading to their deaths in union and the total destruction of the ranch and the fertility of the land under the ranch.
The narrator of the story is the daughter of Esperanza, Pedro's daughter. The narrator then says that all that survived under the smoldering rubble of the ranch was Tita's cookbook, which contained all the recipes described in the preceding chapters.
My Story Review:
This book was recommended to me by my sister.
The story is about how how life used to be in Mexico. It is a love story between Pedro and Tita and their family tradition.
The story will teach us lessons about love, freedom, relationships, women and tradition.
In this story food is often a direct cause of physical and emotional disturbances, and serves as a medium through Tita's emotions.
The images of heat and fire pervade the novel as expressions of powerful emotion. The inner fire of the individual constitutes an important subject in the novel. This novel also shows a family that is female-dominated household.
"The weeping was just the first symptom of a strange intoxication—and acute attack of pain and frustration"
“Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can't strike them all by ourselves; just as in the experiment, we need oxygen and a candle to help."
“Then she cried without tears, which is said to hurt even more like dry labor.”
