So I began to reflect on the differences between Eastern dragons and Western dragons.

Western dragons are evil and undesirable. They guard treasure they have no right to. They breathe fire. They rampage around the countryside terrorising the populace, firing crops and ‘devouring maidens, out of season’ (and if you’ve never had the pleasure of laughing your head off at Stan Freberg’s ‘St George and the Dragonet’, get thee to Google forthwith!). And in this ballad, the dragon is disconsolately coiled at the foot of a tree, killing knights who come to rid the earth of him, and wondering how he can be released from his curse.

The Chinese dragon, on the other hand, is celebrated in festival and dance. The Year of the Dragon is thought to be particularly propitious – parents want their children to be born under the influence of the dragon. The dragon stands for power, but the benvolent power of nature that brings life, and the sort of personal power that brings success. I’m guessing that a young man turned by his stepmother into a Chinese dragon would not be throwing the sort of teenage sulk that ends with seven mighty champions slain and/or an unknown number of maidens devoured. In fact he’d probably think he’d taken a step up in the world.

As is often the way, when I started to look into The Ballad of the Loathsome Worm, one Worm lead to another, and I ended up looking at three: one the primitive ballad running through my head, collected by Francis Child (The Ballad of the Laily Worm and the Machrel of the Sea – Child Ballad no.36); one a literary ballad based on a local legend and associated with Bamburgh Castle (The Laidley Worm of Spindleston Heugh); and one that’s another legend from the North East of England (The Lambton Worm). What these have in common is an evil dragon, with a serpent-like body, that terrorises the land. All are described as ‘laily’ or ‘laidly’ – loathly or loathsome. But only one of them (The Lambton Worm) has to be slain – the other two are tragic creatures, transformed from beautiful humans by an evil stepmother, and both needing rescue. I really wanted to write about my fascination with the Child ballad, but as these Worms are easily confused, I’d better deal with the other two first.

The Lambton Worm is probably the best known. The legend has assumed many forms, and has caught the popular imagination in many ways. It has been told and retold since the time of the Crusades (the human hero was a Crusader), has a family curse attached, and became the subject of pantomime and a popular song in the 19th century. It was retold for popular consumption by R S Surtees of ‘Jorrocks’ fame. I found a powerful parody and cartoon in Punch vol 99 (1890) pp 234-5, where the Worm stands for the slums of London and the Childe who slays it the new London County Council. It is even the subject of an earth sculpture by Andy Goldsworthy, in ‘Lambton Worm country’ in County Durham. It is deliciously gruesome (if that’s what you like). The boy hero, John Lambton, catches a strange eel-like creature when he goes fishing, and puts in a well and forgets about it. He grows up and goes to the Crusades, meanwhile, the Worm (for that is what it is) poisons the well, outgrows it, and devastates the countryside. When John Lambton returns, he needs the help of witchcraft to trap and slay the worm, but it comes at a price. He must kill the first living creature he sees after his triumph over the Worm. He means this to be a hound he has with him – he sees his father first, but kills the hound anyway. Thus his family was cursed from that day. The family still exists, and lives in the same place, and can point to successive Lambtons who’ve died before their time.

The Laidly Worm of Spindleston Heugh has much in common with my Loathsome Worm, but in its literary guise it seems to have absorbed elements of common fairy tales – Beauty and the Beast, and the Sleeping Beauty among others. A King of Northumberland has a beautiful daughter. He is widowed, and brings back in due course a beautiful young queen. She is consumed with jealousy of the princess, and turns her into a terrible and foul dragon. Her brother, Childe Wynde, can turn her back into human form only by kissing the dragon three times. To do this, he needs magic protection, so loathsome is the dragon, but the third kiss turns her back into a fair princess. A very neat and tidy version of the ballad ‘communicated by the Revd Mr Lamb’ was published in A View of Northumberland, by W Hutchinson (1778). There are various antecedents and variants, one of which is the Child Ballad ‘Kemp Owyne’, where the ‘Owyne’ might be a variant of the Arthurian Gawain. Once you start to pull on these threads it’s hard to know when to stop.

But the ballad I really, really wanted to talk about is The Ballad of the Laily Worm and the Machrel of the Sea – Child Ballad no.36. This seems to be the most primitive in ballad form, collected in 1802 or 03 from recitation in the North of Scotland, according to Child. In this version, the Father, who is powerful but not a King, has two children, a handsome son (with no name), and a beautiful daughter, the Lady Masery (or Maisery – what a gorgeous name. I instantly wish I had a daughter, so that I could call her Maisery). The widowed Knight brings home a beautiful but evil new wife, then goes away on some warlike business. The new wife turns the son into the Laily (Loathsome) Worm, coiled at the foot of a tree, and the daughter into The Machrel of the Sea. This time it plays out more simply. The Knight, we assume, comes back to find the Worm striking terror into all and sets off to fight it. The Worm tells him how he has been transformed from human shape, that he has already killed seven champions, and would kill him too, if he were not his father. With the Worm’s tale in his ears, the Knight goes back to his wife and asks where his children are, to which she replies that they’ve gone to the King’s and the Queen’s Court to serve them. The Knight tells her that he knows the truth and insists that she turn his children back into human form. She strikes the Loathsome Worm three times with her magic wand, and instantly he is transformed into a fair young knight. She blows her magic horn that all the fish of the sea obey, but Lady Maisery refuses to come, and says that she would rather stay a machrel of the sea than be bewitched by her stepmother again. Finally, the Knight has his wife burnt as a witch (sorry).

What do I love about this version? Well, I love its primitive fantasy – I think it is the most imaginative of the Worms, in many ways. In this ballad, the Worm is at the centre and tells his own story (the ballad starts with him telling his story to the Knight). There is the amazing image in the centre of the story that the Worm tells:

‘An every Saturday at noon
The machrel comes to me,
An she takes my laily head
An lays it on her knee,
She kaims it wi a siller kaim,
An washes’t in the sea.

The image of a mackerel with knees, comforting her brother and washing and combing his dragon’s hair, is irresistible – although I think we are led to believe that they meet in human form. I find this picture of family love and consolation so touching. I am also entranced by the Lady Maisery’s response at the end:

But the proud machrel of the sea:
‘Ye shapeit me ance an unseemly shape,
An ye’s never mare shape me.’

This is all so original, and so unlike any of the regular fairy tales we’re told. What should the Lady Maisery wish for? To be a Fair Maiden, of course, and to be married to a Brave Knight. But no – she chooses the life of the sea and a day off every Saturday, rather than be beholden to her tormentor. Nobody has tried to borrow the tropes from the better-known tales to tidy this one up. I love it, and I adore the version of it that is (coming full circle) still ear-worming away in my head – the track The Loathsome Worm And The Mackerel Of The Sea, from the album ‘Strange Histories’ by the wonderful but elusive singer James Raynard. He has chosen a splendid, earworm-y tune to sing it to: ‘An Italian Rant’, from Playford’s Dancing Master. Long may this track survive on MySpace – but do please buy the whole album; it is all as good.

So, for the Year of the Dragon, this is not a very auspicious start from me. (Jackie has done a much better job of celebrating it!) I’ve given you three dragons, one of which was an unalloyed Bad Thing and needed to be destroyed, and two of which were beautiful humans trapped in loathly dragon bodies, from which they needed to be released. Not much to celebrate there! I think that Chinese Dragons are a much better bet – they’re anything but loathsome, and, the same as Stevie Smith’s famous cat, they like ‘to gallop about doing good’!

Looking for illustrations for this piece, I’ve been able to find a public domain image only of The Lambton Worm, who at the top of the piece will have to stand in for all three. The drawing is an illustration in English fairy and other folk tales, by Edwin Sidney Hartland. Published by Forgotten Books, 1890. Walter Crane had a great Pre-raphaelite-ish time painting the kissing of the Laidly Worm of Spindleston Heugh (apologies for the poor quality rights-free image). Also, some wonderful new terracotta panels have been created for Bamburgh Castle depicting the legend. But I have not been able to find an image of my favourite Loathsome Worm. Jackie – your mission, should you choose to accept it …….? However, the legend has inspired someone to create a gorgeous bookmark in dragon form, so this link will have to do for now.

A David & Charles Book 2008 128 pp. ISBN-13:987-1-60061-139-1

Jackie  hasn’t yet painted a dragon, but has done other wildlife, some of which you can see here

Random House 2011 368 pp. ISBN-13:978-1400067121 available in ebook and traditional formats

Monday-Jackie starts off the week with the powerful novel Dreams of Joy by Lisa See.

Wednesday- Jackie looks at the many kinds of dragons that artist John Howe has created in his book Forging Dragons.

Friday-Hilary picks up the Dragon idea, if not the Chinese idea, and contemplates the Ballad of the Loathsome Worm.

This atmospheric painting is part of the Nine Dragons scroll by Chen Rong, from the Sung Dynasty.

When Jane Juska retired from her job as an English teacher she decided that what she really wanted was some human contact – of the physical, male, sexual, variety.  Re-entering the lists when you’re a bit past your prime is not an easy thing to do, and it’s no surprise that A Round-Heeled Woman struck a chord with so many women – divorced, widowed, empty-nesters – all feeling they’d been put out to pasture far too early and wondering what to do about it.

I doubt however that too many of them would have considered trying Jane Juska’s slightly risky tactic of placing an personal ad in the New York Review of Books:

“Before I turn 67 – next March – I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like.  If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.”

To her utter surprise, she was inundated with replies from hopeful suitors, which she sorted ruthlessly into “Yes”, “No” and “Maybe” piles … and then began the fraught process of making contact.

Her account of the meetings – variously disastrous, odd and hopeful – with the oddball and mostly pretty pathetic applicants are interspersed with  vignettes from her life.  We learn about her upbringing and schooling in the pre-Women’s Lib America of the 1950s, her early encounters with the opposite sex, her eventual (less than successful) marriage and the birth of her son; and along the way we also encounter a motley supporting cast of school friends, neighbours, prison inmates and passing strangers.  Together, they provide a narrative that is in turns funny, graphic (you have been warned), outrageous, shrewd, irritating and – at times – incredibly sad.  Nothing, you feel, worked out quite the way she hoped it would and although several of the men remained friends, the one she truly fell in love with – a man several decades her junior – eventually married someone of his own age.

Three years later, Jane Juska wrote Unaccompanied Women – not so much a sequel to A Round-Heeled Woman as an account of the fall-out from its publication – which achieved something of a succès de scandale.  Much in demand for book signings and as a motivational speaker she is amazed by the number of people who say that her book was a game-changer for them – gave them the courage to take control of their own lives instead of remaining in their well-worn furrows to the end of their frustrated days.  She’s also slightly unnerved to find that she’s expected to be an expert in the field of human relationships and dish out advice to the lonely, the frustrated and the just plain confused, in spite of having a personal life that could be uncharitably described as a bit of a train wreck.

Some of the major male characters from the first book are reintroduced – but only to tell us that they have died or become ‘just good friends’ or are content to conduct a pseudo-relationship via a computer terminal.

In fact, by the end of Unaccompanied Women she’s pretty much decided that there are worse things in life than being a woman alone – but it’s a conclusion that’s tinged with a  sadness – the sort of sadness that comes from bowing to the inevitable and resorting to the unsatisfactory consolation of counting your blessings.

At the beginning of her extraordinary ‘late life adventures in sex and romance’, Jane Juska said that although her intellect tells her a woman doesn’t need a man to be “A Woman”, her heart and her body tell her otherwise.  It’s not a contention I can agree with.  I didn’t agree with it when I first read the book 8 years ago, and I don’t agree with it now.  It may be that our brains are simply wired differently.  Being a bit younger – and growing up in the 60s and 70s – I don’t have 1950s’ luggage that she carries with her and speaks about so honestly.  (I, of course,  have no such luggage …)   But be that as it may, I liked the woman whose voice sprang from the pages so vividly … and I liked her even more when I interviewed her recently for Vulpes, during the run of the stage version of A Round Heeled Woman in London.

She writes as she is – funny, intelligent, forthright and painfully honest.  She and her books may not be to everyone’s taste and I might have occasionally found myself wanting to shake her until her teeth rattled – but in a world dominated by the anodyne, the mawkish and the lowest common denominator – she’s an absolute gem.

A Round-Heeled Woman:  Vintage.  2004.  ISBN: 978-0099466703. 288pp.
Unaccompanied Women:  Vintage.  2007.  ISBN: 978-0099481294.  272pp.

(you know what’s coming next, don’t you?)

… left the USB stick in the laptop.

The review WILL appear, I promise – but not until this evening.  Sorry.

(Goes off to make a big mug of really strong coffee ….)

I was much amused to get this book in my Christmas stocking from my sister-in-law-to-be especially as she’s very well aware of my ongoing allergy to any kind of a family Christmas (thanks, Sue!) and my constant desire for seasonal solitude (apart from seeing her good self, of course …).

So, Christmas seemed to be the ideal time for a spot of light reading and the rollercoaster plot kept me going through the plethora of mince pies and glitter. I gather it was originally published by the now defunct Transita (a press focusing on the older woman) and this fitted in nicely with the family theme.

There’s certainly a heck of a lot happening in the story and I felt I’d experienced about a year’s worth of high- and low-octane events all pressed within the framework of a few days over the holiday period. This becomes both a strength and a weakness of the novel – in that I can well see how it would be ideal in a madcap kind of film, but I’m not entirely sure it works successfully as a book. I’m not convinced either that I ever fully got to grips with the different family members or what their various secret agendas were in terms of getting William, the centre around which the cast of characters orbits, to bequeath his house and fortune to a worthy recipient. Plus there’s a heck of a lot of dialogue and I longed for some setting or description to provide a better balance and a bit of a breather here and there. My, but how they talk and how liberally they use those pesky exclamation marks (sigh …).

Perhaps because of this approach, I found I didn’t have much sympathy with the people, and felt widow Hilary, as a would-be heroine, was difficult to empathise with. Not that there was anything particularly horrible about her, but she didn’t grip me as she should have done. Sharing the limelight with Hilary in terms of female roles was the nanny Frances, who was again perfectly nice but rather bland. They were the sort of women you meet at a party but then instantly forget.

That said, the menfolk did seem to be written with a degree or so more clarity, which was an unexpected blessing. Though I was initially confused to be told two or three times at the start how selfish and miserly William was – whereas in fact he’s lovely in a grumpy-but-sweet way. So I could have done with less telling me what I should be feeling about William as he was more than able to reveal his own character himself. Indeed I wish he’d been on the stage, as it were, more often, as he brought a degree of sense to the sheer lunacy of proceedings. He had some great one-liners too, which I don’t really want to reveal in case they’ll spoil your fun. Suffice it to say William was great, and I loved his cat, Scratch, too – the real hero of the piece (and at last in my recent reading matter there’s a cat who doesn’t come to any harm, hurrah!…). I also thought Hilary’s son, Daniel, was a breath of fresh air, but he and Frances did seem to declare undying love way too quickly, which was definitely unrealistic – though perhaps more acceptable in a film.

Mind you, one character I did feel very sorry for was poor Leo. Yes, he’s tremendously irritating and self-obsessed to the point of caricature (surely he must have one redeeming feature but I fear it escaped me …), but everyone in the whole family, and even the cat, is unremittingly horrid to him and it did get somewhat wearing. I admit he’s too thick-skinned to catch on to this, but even so some glimmer of seasonal courtesy from the rest of the bunch might have been nice.

That said, in the end, though it’s not the best-written book I’ve known (see my comment above about those exclamation marks …), it was pleasantly light and certainly indicated that my so-far eighteen year resolution to never have a family Christmas again was probably the best decision I’ve made. Or one of them anyway. Talking of endings, I did enjoy the final few pages of the book, where William sorts the whole family out (at last) in terms of their futures and romantic relationships with his customary common-sense and brevity. Well done to him. Oh and the decision of who gets everything in the will was charmingly done indeed. It left me with a smile on my face and enough sense of post-Christmas cheer to get me through the New Year. Just.

A Proper Family Christmas, OxPens 2008, ISBN: 1 904623 11 5
Also available as an ebook

[Anne remains determined to keep Christmas family visits at bay by the simple solution of having absolutely no spare beds in her house. It’s worked so far …]

The other intriguing element to the experience is that 8 well-known writers have been asked to devise a fictional identity for each, to stand in for the real one while further research continues.

These are just a handful of the thousands of portraits of unknown men, women and children, in galleries and houses all over the country. The fourteen on display here stand in for them, in a way, and are all such lively personalities that I found I could hardly bear to think of the rest of them being forgotten. These portraits have been the subject of research in a project led by Bristol University, and some tentative identifications have been made. I fell in love with this little exhibition, tucked away on a landing off one of the sweeping staircases of the NPG, and I do recommend it.

I dithered over buying the book that goes with the exhibition, containing the fictional identities, but in the end I did so. I wondered if I might find it irritating, and I feared that the writers would strike the wrong note for the period. But I need not have worried about that. The eight pieces are in a variety of styles and genres. Some read like extracts from a lively history textbook, others strike just the right note for one of the short pieces in the Dictionary of National Biography, where the known facts barely stretch to the 500 words allowed. Some are written in the first person, as extracts from letters and journals, where the writer strives to extract the character of the person from their painted image. All in all, I really enjoyed reading these little jeux d’esprit, both for the pleasure of agreeing with them as character descriptions, and for the pleasure of shouting ‘Nooo – that can’t be right! He’s got an honest face!’

The writers are: Alexander McCall Smith, John Banville, Tracy Chevalier, Julian Fellowes, Terry Pratchett, Sarah Singleton, Joanna Trollope and Minette Walters. The life stories are bookended by two pieces that take a rather more fantastical turn than the others – Alexander McCall Smith’s revelation that a sinuously stately 16c lady was Mary Queen of Scots’s body double; and a typically amusing piece by Terry Pratchett identifying a pudding-faced 17c knight with a hapless navigator rejoicing in the wonderful name of Sir Joshua Easement, who, in a permanent state of being lost, found Australia but never told anybody because he didn’t know where he was.

Joanna Trollope and Minette Waters specialise in the first person – letters and diaries – and give a fresh approach to imagining the effect that someone looking at the portrait in the age when it was painted would feel. One letter to a mother speculates on whether the man in the portrait would make a good husband; another (the one that made me cry ‘Noooo!’) by Minette Waters tells us that the subject is a con-man, dressing up in a uniform to which he is not entitled. She knows how to twist a knife in the reader’s ribs, too, as she has her narrator say that the political wind has changed, and the sash of the uniform might have to be painted out – and she must have spotted, as I did, that the finest, most skilful and delicate painting in the whole exhibition was on that sash – paint it out? Noooo!. But what a brilliant touch! However my favourite two pieces are by John Banville – both DNB-length short pieces, written as factual, but with a deliciously nasty tinge, about two men of obscure background and violent end, one a Christopher Marlowe-like diplomatic fixer and spy, swiftly assassinated, and the other a handsome officer in the New Model Army with Rupert Brooke-like spectacular good looks, fatally wounded in battle and painted on his deathbed.

So, even if you cannot get to London to see the exhibition (which, if you get there, is free), the book is well worth getting hold of. It has double value – the ingenious ‘flash fiction’ style imagined lives, and at the end, notes about each painting, its provenance and disputed attribution, and the results of the research that has gone into attempting to give its identity back. It’s a little gem.

Perhaps it is just me – I can get stupidly emotional about the idea that real people survive in portraits and photographs, with their personalities shining through, but no-one knows who they are any more. However, this exhibition shows that there is a future for them. These fourteen people will not be ignored – people will wonder who they were, and what the portraits tell us about their personalities and lives. While I am on the subject, there is a similar source of pleasurable musing to be found in one of my favourite, much more frivolous, websites: My Daguerrotype Boyfriend. I have hitherto tried to draw a veil over why I’ve found this site so fascinating – but this exhibition Imagined Lives has helped me understand the addiction – and now I recommend it to you along with this exhibition and this book. These faces from the past are begging for their story to be told.

John Banville et al. Imagined Lives: portraits of unknown people. London: National Portrait Gallery, 2011. Paperback ed. 96pp
ISBN: 9781855144552

Laura Esquivel is a Mexican writer. She’s most well-known for her first novel, Like Water for Chocolate, which was made into a film in 1994. But the novel was written before the film: everyone had told Esquivel, who worked as a nursery school teacher as well as doing a little screen-writing, that her idea for the film would never be made. It would be too expensive, what with the 19th-century Mexican army costumes, the giant dovecot at the end of the ranch’s roof, the extraordinary fires and ghostly visions, the flowing mountains of food, and so on. So, Esquivel, who was married to the film director Alfonso Arau, wrote her idea as a novel anyway, with the idea for a film still at the back of her mind. When it was a success (it was Mexico’s best-selling novel for three years running), the moneymen and producers came back and said ‘this really would make a great film’. The novel is packed with supernatural fantasy events, caused by powerful emotions and marvellous food, and it just cries out for cinematification. So her husband made the film, it was beautiful, and the most successful foreign film in the USA, and then their marriage broke up, apparently over the profits. That’s a pretty sad ending, to a lovely film and a terrific book that celebrate love, over and over again.

The story is about love, and about food. It’s set sometime around the end of the 19th century, in rural Mexico near the American border, on a large and prosperous ranch run by Elena De La Garza. Tita is the youngest of her three daughter, and is condemned by her evil mother never to be allowed to marry because her destiny is take care of her mother until she dies. Tita is also a marvellous cook, and often the reader must think, why don’t you just poison the old witch?, because if ever there was a wicked mother in a fairy story, Mama Elena is that character. Tita’s life is complicated when she and Pedro fall in love. Mama Elena won’t hear of letting Tita marry, because of the youngest-daughter-as-slave tradition, so she calmly offers her eldest daughter Rosaura to Pedro instead. Pedro is not happy about this, but on the advice of his father he marries Rosaura so he can be near Tita. Tita’s grief and tears flow into the wedding cake that she and Nacha, the family cook, are making. This has the explosive result of uncontrollable vomiting by all the wedding guests. Similarly extravagant results follow whenever Tita is feeling passionate or emotional, and each of the twelve chapters of the book is structured around the recipe responsible.

The recipes are more than just a way to link the events of the story, they are part of the story. When Tita is born, her mother is chopping onions and Tita can feel their juices so strongly inside the womb that she is born on a wave of tears. When Tita is feeling desperate with love for her lost lover Pedro, who now lives in the same house, she makes quail in rose petal sauce for dinner. Her mother won’t eat it, it tastes too salty. Pedro loves it, Rosaura feels sick after three bites. But when Gertrudis, the middle daughter, and Mama Elena’s child from a secret love affair, eats her dish of quail, she is overcome with a lust so strong that she has to run from the room for the shower. The heat from her body sets the shower room on fire and she has to run naked into the fields to cool down. She is swept up by a rebel army captain, and carried away on horseback, for an energetic career working in brothels, and then in the army as a successful general. For food to do all that, it must be something magical.

There is no obvious magic in the story: Tita is not casting spells, and doesn’t see anything unusual in the visions she has or the peculiar results of her emotional struggles when people eat her meals. When she escapes from Mama Elena’s ranch she nearly dies, and refuses to speak for six months until she realises that she is not speaking because she chooses not to. With this realisation, that she has free will and can do what she wants, her slavery has ended. But the nasty daughter-slave tradition is to be carried on, in Esperanza, the daughter of Rosaura and Pedro. Tita is furious, and Rosaura’s death, after a three-day screaming argument between the sisters over poor Esperanza’s fate, is a very odd one indeed.

I love the cookery in this novel. I like reading recipes that tell stories and have history wrapped around them. I also really like recipes with ingredients that I don’t know, or can’t even pronounce. The recipes in this novel are a bit like Mrs Beeton’s, in that they involve improbable quantities, like the wedding cake that uses 17 eggs and the juice and grated peel of one lime. Tita’s stuffed chillies with walnut sauce needs a sack of nuts and 8 pomegranates. My fingernails ache just thinking about all the effort put into food preparation: it’s so much nicer, and more restful, just to read about it.

Next to recipes for food, I like stories that give you medicinal remedies, and the ingredients for cool drinks. When Mama Elena finally dies, the malice of her ghost lights a spilling oil lamp and sets Pedro on fire. Tita heals his burns with thinly grated potato and egg whites beaten in oil. She stops any scarring with a poultice of the bark of an unpronounceable tree. How can anyone not enjoy reading about magical remedies like that? They are almost real, subtly unreal. For something to happen, Esquivel just says that it happens, and we swallow the fantasy completely. This novel is a delicious and beautiful meal for the senses.

Lurking behind the fantastical kitchen episodes, we have a considerable amount of Mexican history. Soldiers and rebels trot to and fro across the fields, and villages are perpetually being attacked by one army or another: we never really know what the war is about, or between whom. People die unexpectedly from stray bullets, but the cooking has to go on. When General Gertrudis brings her soldiers back to the ranch to visit, they eat almost all the food and animals. The maids have to serve all the meals in shifts, one beginning as soon as the earlier one has ended. The sheer effort of feeding the men constructs the routine of the house.

When Tita and the other women aren’t cooking, they are sewing. When Rosaura is married, a silk sheet is prepared with a hole in the middle, surrounded by beautiful embroidery, so that the marriage can be consummated without immodesty. All her daughter’s nappies are snow white and embroidered with silk around the edges. Tita crochets a vast woollen bedspread for years and years, as a way of absorbing her misery about Pedro, night after night. When she leaves the ranch, it is almost the size of the house, trailing behind her in the carriage like a comfort blanket when she is taken away to safety.

‘Like water for chocolate’ is actually an abbreviation: it should really be ‘like hot water for chocolate’, and means the boiling water used to make hot chocolate. This is a Mexican idiom (apparently) that signifies the moment of passion and emotion when you are just about to explode, with joy, or rage, or grief. That upwelling surge from the heart is the power behind the magical cooking in the novel.

Anchor, 256 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0385420174.

Kate podcasts weekly about forgotten fiction and curious books on www.reallylikethisbook.com

W.W. Norton 2010 253 pp. ISBN 978-0-393-33989-5