Food writing can refer to poetry and fiction, such as Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), with its famous passage where the narrator recollects his childhood memories as a result of sipping tea and eating a madeleine; or Robert Burns' poem "Address to a Haggis", 1787.
Charles Dickens, a notable novelist wrote memorably about food, e.g., in his A Christmas Carol (1843).
Another American food writer, Adam Gopnik, divides food writing into two categories, "the mock epic and the mystical microcosmic," and provides examples of their most noted practitioners: The mock epic (A. J. Liebling, Calvin Trillin, the French writer Robert Courtine, and any good restaurant critic) is essentially comic and treats the small ambitions of the greedy eater as though they were big and noble, spoofing the idea of the heroic while raising the minor subject to at least temporary greatness.
The mystical microcosmic, of which Elizabeth David and M. F. K. Fisher are the masters, is essentially poetic, and turns every remembered recipe into a meditation on hunger and the transience of its fulfillment.
Classics of food writing, such as the 18th century French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin's La physiologie du goût (The Physiology of Taste), pre-date the term and have helped to shape its meaning.
It is considered distinct from the more traditional field of culinary history, which focuses on the origin and recreation of specific recipes.
[13] The ancient Romans also wrote about their grand feasts and fancy meals held by emperors of the time.