Like Water for Chocolate

Like Water for Chocolate Summary | Chapter 1, January, Christmas Rolls Summary

Once you start chopping onions it is hard to stop your tears. Tita is especially susceptible to tears… just like her great aunt, Tita, who reportedly cried in the womb. That is another story. Tita's great aunt was born in the kitchen and lived most of her life cooking. Tita takes after her in that respect way. Life, for Tita, is the delight of food, and the kitchen is her realm. When Tita was a young girl, she became good friends with the cook, and they often played games, even shaping the sausage they made into the shapes of animals, as though it were balloons.

The only time Tita was not upset at the frying of her little sausage creatures was when the sausages were offered in the making of Christmas rolls. They embodied everything Tita loved about her life at home, the ritual of the sausage making, the rising of the yeast, and the closeness of the women in the kitchen.

The women are in the kitchen when Pedro Muzquiz comes to call one day. Tita's mother, Mama Elena, warns her not to encourage him, because she knows the rules. The youngest daughter cannot marry, so she will always be available to take care of her mother in her old age.

Tita does not dare challenge this custom, but wonders who is supposed to take care of her, since she will not have any daughters of her own. Maybe no one expected a person to live much after their parent's die, if they are the youngest. There are all kinds of arguments in her head, but that is where they stay.

Pedro brings his father with him the next day to ask Mama Elena for Tita, but Mama is fixed. Mama does, however, offer up her oldest daughter, Rosaura, who is only two years older than Tita and completely available. Tita stays in the kitchen while her fate is decided, and only later does Mama Elena tell her that Pedro had agreed to marry Rosaura.

Nacha, the cook and Tita's confidante, approaches Pedro later and asks how he could have agreed to such a thing. Pedro tells her that if he cannot have Tita, he can marry her sister and at least be close to her in that way. Pedro will marry, with his great love for Tita, not Rosaura. Tita finds little consolation in that, though, and sobs herself to sleep over the bedspread she had been crocheting for her married life.