Sadly, my "mac and cheese in the media" Googling returned nothing but a few recipes and a slightly disturbing "If you were macaroni and cheese, what type of macaroni and cheese would you be?" quiz.

So instead, this blog entry is on food and drinks made famous through books, films and TV.

For starters, it's hard to go past the Cosmopolitan cocktail that was served on Sex and the City. While the success of the Cosmo came as a surprise, the success of the show's second most famous drink - the Absolut Hunk - was a little more calculated. As was reported on SBS's Cutting Edge, the Absolut Spirits company hit pay dirt when it set up the mother of all promotions.

It approached the SATC producers and reportedly pitched the idea of an episode being written around Absolut Vodka. Before you can say "Wow, that's blatant product placement" an episode was written in which Samantha gets her boyfriend Smith a modelling job as the face of Absolut Vodka and a new cocktail, the Absolut Hunk, is born. Unsurprisingly, as soon as the episode aired, the Absolut Hunk cocktail was the "in" drink.

On Seinfeld, one of the most memorable episodes featured Newman's obsession with jambalaya soup from the infamous Soup Nazi. The Soup Nazi episode was inspired by Al Yeganeh of Soup Kitchen International in New York City. While his mind-blowingly delicious soups were already creating huge queues, the Seinfeld episode encouraged even more people (including one of my best friends) to visit New York and see just how scary the real Soup Nazi actually was. (Answer: sure, fairly scary.)

But not many people know that Yeganeh threatened to sue the producers of Seinfeld if they ever used the Soup Nazi character again. In an interview in People Weekly in 1998, Yeganeh was quoted as saying: "The show really destroyed my personal life and my emotional and physical well-being. Because of this show, customers think I'm going to kill them and they panic."

The Brady Bunch left us all wanting to eat pork chops and apple sauce. Gilligan's Island was all about the banana cream pie. And on The Simpsons, Duff Beer - which didn't exist before the series - now sells for thousands of dollars a carton. In fact, just recently a north Queensland woman was ordered to serve 18 months' probation for a Duff Beer Internet scam.

When it comes to food in films, Silence of the Lambs featured fava beans (and human flesh) as the dish du jour. American Pie turned us all off apple pie forever. Girl Interrupted reminded us that stuffing half-eaten chicken carcasses under the bed could see us on the fast track to the asylum. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had every child wanting an ever-lasting gob stopper. Pulp Fiction was all about the $5 milkshake and the big kahuna burger. And for a while there in the early '90s, it was difficult to open a box of chocolates without quoting Forrest Gump.

However, when it comes to making our mouths truly water, it is the combination of imagination and vivid description that is the most tantalising. Chocolat by Joanna Harris tells the story of Vianne Rocher, a single mother who moves with her daughter to the small, repressed French town of Lansquenet in the 1950s. When Vianne opens a chocolate boutique - opposite the village church - at the start of Lent (a time of self-denial), battle-lines are drawn and the community is divided.

Your mouth will start watering as descriptions of chocolate eclairs, pain au chocolat, chocolate espresso, chococcinos and chilli chocolates fill the pages. The novel was credited with inspiring a revival in sales of quality chocolate from chocolatiers.