To evoke a feeling or a memory is to make it come up in someone. A song can evoke a summer; a speech can evoke anger or hope; spices can evoke a market you walked through as a child. You can also evoke a response — make people react. It is at home in writing about art, food, and memory, a step more formal than bring back or remind, but not rare. Though actually, the Latin is “call out / summon,” so older and literary English also uses evoke for calling up a spirit or an image. Do not mix it with invoke, which is more “call on”: you invoke a law, a god, or a right. Evoke pulls something forth; invoke calls something in to help you.