Like Water For Chocolate - Meaning of Title

Meaning of Title

Like Water for Chocolate's full title is: Like Water for Chocolate: A novel in monthly installments with recipes, romances and home remedies.

The phrase "like water for chocolate" comes from the Spanish como agua para chocolate. This phrase is a common expression in some Spanish-speaking countries and was the inspiration for Laura Esquivel's novel title and it means that one is very angry. In some Latin American countries, such as Mexico, hot chocolate is made not with milk, but with near-boiling water instead.

An alternate interpretation of the saying "like water for chocolate" is to be like water that is hot enough to receive the chocolate (when preparing hot chocolate to drink). It is a metaphor for describing a state of passion or sexual arousal (i.e. 'hot and ready'). This would describe the bubbling passion Tita and Pedro have for each other throughout the book.

Read more about this topic:  Like Water For Chocolate

Famous quotes containing the words meaning of, meaning and/or title:

    “All the moral laws are readily translated into natural philosophy, for often we have only to restore the primitive meaning of the words by which they are expressed, or to attend to their literal instead of their metaphorical sense. They are already supernatural philosophy.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “To lose sensibility, to see what one sees,
    As if sight had not its own miraculous thrift,
    To hear only what one hears, one meaning alone,
    As if the paradise of meaning ceased
    To be paradise, it is this to be destitute.”
    —Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)

    “Down the road, on the right hand, on Brister’s Hill, lived Brister Freeman, “a handy Negro,” slave of Squire Cummings once.... Not long since I read his epitaph in the old Lincoln burying-ground, a little on one side, near the unmarked graves of some British grenadiers who fell in the retreat from Concord,—where he is styled “Sippio Brister,”MScipio Africanus he had some title to be called,—”a man of color,” as if he were discolored.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)