Food writer Jonathon Gold describes the tricks of his trade:
Food words are pretty specific. If something’s salty, you’ve gotta say it’s "salty." There’s no other word that means the same thing. You could say "briny," but that’s something different. You could use an analogy, but since saltiness is something you have to convey in almost every column—there’s salt, you know? You have to talk about it. … A lot of [learning to write about food] was reading Balzac’s twenty-page descriptions of somebody’s socks. The nineteenth-century guys used tons of physical description because there wasn’t photography yet, much less movies. In Dickens, the wrinkles in somebody’s jodhpurs actually meant something. And they would have to be described exactly. That transfers to food writing.
The Dish 