In Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust talks of a family picnic by the Vivonne River consisting of fruit, bread, and chocolate.

A mouth-watering description of a visit to the grocer’s is a featured scene in Charles Dickens’s ATale of Two Cities.

White flour was a staple item in the Ingalls household in Little House on the Prairie.

Sad, broke, and hungry in a Skid Row hotel in Chicago, Jack Kerouac dreams of food.

Willa Cather’s story “The Bohemian Girl” celebrates the culture of Nebraska immigrants and devotes an entire section of the story to a loving description of a barn dance supper.

The Club of Angels by Brazilian writer Luís Veríssimo tells the story of a group of mischievous chefs.

A caterpillar is found in a cauliflower cheese in Barbara Pym’s Some Tame Gazelle.

Molly Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses loves to eat organ meat.

Ratty (in Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows) is warmed by the smell of buttered toast.

In Isak Dinesen’s book Chéri, Léa de Lonval recalls rousing her 19-year-old lover from sleep to “cram him with strawberries and cream, frothy milk, and corn-fed chicken.”