[In the essay below, Daily discusses the prominent role that food has played in numerous literary works and cites A Debt to Pleasure as the most recent example of this trend.]

"This is not a conventional cookbook," suggests the preface to John Lanchester's new novel The Debt to Pleasure. And despite carefully worded directives for making flawless lemon tarts and meltingly tender roast lamb, an entire chapter devoted to aioli, the potent French garlic sauce, and as thorough a discussion of bouillabaisse as exists anywhere, it most clearly is not a cookbook.

It's delicious to read, though, a fictional feast chronicling the life of Tarquin Winot, an Englishman with a big appetite for culinary observations ("We then sat down to a meal which Dante would have hesitated to invent") and diabolical ideas about how to use mushrooms. Lanchester serves food as the main course, with plot and characters carefully selected to simmer alongside.

Gastronomic pleasures have a long history in the world of storytelling. Marcel Proust, discreetly nibbling a tender little tea biscuit, found that the cake unleashed a lifetime of remembrances, enough for him to fill a book.

Many other writers have been similarly seduced. From Dante's discussion of apples in Eden to Henry Fielding's ribald scenes of seduction, food conveys a larderful of hungers and emotions.

In To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf wrote of boeuf en daube, with its exquisite aroma of olives and oil, a "confusion of savory brown and yellow meats." Emotions were similarly tangled and confused. Isak Dinesen wrote lavishly of food in Babette's Feast, in which the tragic, red-haired Babette cooked with the passion of an artist for people who barely remembered what they ate. Ironically, Dinesen is said to have starved to death. In Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman, the central character starves, too, unable to eat first meat and then almost anything else. She herself was being consumed, by fears and doubts of impending marriage.

Other authors have stirred food into the fictional stewpot, among them Leo Tolstoy, James Joyce, William Makepeace Thackeray, Washington Irving, Lawrence Durrell, Charles Dickens and Nora Ephron, using repasts to explore powerful themes and relationships.

"Food is a provocative and endlessly powerful medium that everyone understands on the most basic level. In Here Let Us Feast, a book of food passages culled from fictional works, M.F.K. Fisher wrote that food is "honest and intrinsically necessary in any human scheme, any plan for the future." People have always feasted, she noted, as a way of admitting that "hunger is more than a problem of belly and guts."

But as readily apparent as it is, food also resonates with layers of emotions and elaborate rituals that move it beyond the obvious. Whether it's used as a meal or a metaphor, food allows a story to unfold in unexpectedly delicious ways.

These are palmy times for food to flourish as a means of expression. Many of us, with our easy access to food wherever and whenever we desire it, have long forgotten hardscrabble times of need and want. A celebratory sense of abundance has spilled into the literary world, where it rests comfortably with our current, cult-like love affair with food.

In Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel begins each chapter with a traditional Mexican recipe, preparations that, like human emotions, are based on the subtle interplay of seemingly disparate ingredients. Throughout the book, which begins with Tita de la Garza being born on the kitchen table amid a profusion of onions, garlic, cilantro and bay leaves, sex and magic are wondrously woven together.

The interior scenes of the kitchen easily overwhelm the exterior ones, and in Tita's richly articulated domestic world, passion is always on the verge of boiling over. "It was as if a strange alchemical process had dissolved (Tita's) entire being into the rose petal sauce, in the tender flesh of the quails, in the wine, in every one of the meal's aromas," Esquivel wrote, a passage so powerful that it has made quail in rose petal sauce a favorite for Valentine's Day dinners a deux.

Lanchester, deputy editor of the London Review of Books, says that sex, food and passion often share the page for good reason.

"There's an automatic reflex between food and sex, which are two of the most fundamental appetites we have as human beings. It just so happens that food is more socially open and so we write about the food. The sexual aspects and the passions are right there on the surface, thought."

He explains that for him, food, with its myriad meanings, is the absolute center of the fictional world, a means to tell a story and a vehicle for moving it along.

"In writing, there's some discussion as to whether we choose the subject or the subject chooses us," he says. "I was chosen by food because, even standing alone, it reveals so much about emotions and motivations."

Jacqueline Deval, author of Reckless Appetites: A Culinary Romance, a 1993 novel that includes nearly 100 historical recipes, suggests that the truest nature of a book's characters can emerge by examining their relationship to what they eat.

"Food in different social settings gives license for people to behave in certain ways—with greed, pleasure, love, generosity, even at times revenge," she explains. "It's an informal way to get into the depths of personality."

Deval gives shape to Pomme Bouquin, the book's central character, through her examinations of the lives of great writers, including Emily Dickinson, D.H. Lawrence and the French novelist Colette. From the annals of cooking and literature, Pomme has learned "that the finest seduction engages all the senses," most certainly the sense of taste.

Deval says approaching her story from a culinary angle and interspersing it with recipes was "purely self-centered and hedonistic," a way for her to indulge her own interest in food and cooking.

"I thought at first I would write a literary cookbook, but as I researched and wrote, I found that a distinct, strong voice was emerging. It was then that I saw a fictional love story emerging," Deval says, an evolution that shouldn't be altogether surprising.

Colette, who routinely meandered into the sensual pleasures of food, wrote that there are two kinds of love, "well-fed and ill-fed." The rest, she said, "is pure fiction."