The family servant, Nacha, Tita's surrogate mother, teaches her secrets and makes her the next in an ancient line of great family chefs. From Nacha and her mother Tita learns the art of cooking. While all the food did not center around Tita, most of it was. Even from the time of birth of Tita she was a part of the cooking, for example when she was born and Nacha scooped up the salt left behind from the broken water of Mama Elena after the birth of Tita.
Tita creates a dish with quails and rose petals, and through it conquers Pedro's heart. The food overtook pedro with love, lust and desire, ending with sex between him and Tita later that evening. Everybody in the family gets turned on, especially Tita's sister Gertrudis, whose body becomes so hot she sets the shower stall on fire, and is subsequently picked up on horseback, naked, by a Mexican revolutionary. She will, as you might expect, live happily ever after.
The escape of Gertrudis serves as a foil to Tita's stifled passion. The intensity of the former's reaction to the meal serves to communicate the potency of the passion that the latter possesses but is unable to express directly. With her primary form of expression limited to food, Tita takes the illicit token of love from Pedro and returns the gift, transforming it into a meal filled with lust (Page 48: “…closing his eyes in voluptuous delight and exclaiming, ‘It’s a dish for the gods!’”) The manner in which Gertrudis is affected by the food and later swept away on a galloping horse is clearly fantastical, and the vivid imagery (the pink sweat and powerful aroma) (Page 50: “Gertrudis was really stricken, her whole was dripping with sweat, smelling of roses, a lovely strong smell”) (Page 52:”the aroma from Gertrudis’ body guided him”) exemplifies the novel's magical realism.
The disappearance of Gertrudis reveals much about female sexuality in Like Water for Chocolate. While Tita can only articulate her sexuality within the domestic sphere, Gertrudis is able to exceed these boundaries without a second thought. Her flight can be seen as a triumph, wherein she sheds notions of social propriety to pursue her unbridled desires. Conversely, her departure from the ranch is also a sort of expulsion: The free expression of female desire clearly has no place in the ordered domestic realm. The contrasting experiences of Gertrudis and Tita illustrate the only two possibilities for female desire, both of which are extremes: stifled and unarticulated, or hypersexualized to the point of being pornographic.
The later revelation that Gertrudis is of mixed ancestry makes it interesting to read this chapter (and further characterizations of Gertrudis) in terms of racial stereotypes. Her intense eroticism (her strong sense of rhythm is mentioned later) corresponds to typical depictions of mulatto characters. It is possible to argue that, in showering, Gertrudis is attempting to rid herself of her inherent sexuality. Additionally, her insatiable desire may also be related to the circumstances of her parentage, because she was born of a love that was never fulfilled. Yet, though there is some textual support for a reading of Gertrudis as sexualized by her background, such a reading seems out of place in a novel normally so sensitive to issues of marginality and otherness.
