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"Let the sky rain potatoes!": the hidden meanings behind Shakespeare's food obsession
Shakespeare and his peers served up hearty helpings of diverse dishes and ingredients – many of them spiced with forgotten meanings. Sam Bilton reveals how food allusions illustrate key themes of everyday life
Published: March 25, 2026 at 3:30 PM
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“There shall be no more cakes and ale”
Puritan hypocrisy
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Shakespeare’s works are peppered with countless food references: pies, cakes, capons and a great deal of sherry, for starters. Some are set-dressing details, but many were allusions that would have been obvious to theatregoers of the day – references to dietary theory, political ideas and cultural mores. Food was important to all – something to which everyone could relate, irrespective of social standing or level of literacy.
Take the moment in Act 2, Scene 3 of Twelfth Night when the fun-loving Sir Toby Belch asks Olivia’s Puritan steward, Malvolio: “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”
Malvolio in Twelfth Night. This pompous Puritan is ridiculed for censuring ‘ales’ (festive social gatherings) (Image by Getty Images)
In Shakespeare’s day, the word ‘ale’ referred not only to a drink but also to social gatherings celebrating everything from religious holidays (for example, Whitsun-ales) to weddings – hence the word ‘bridal’, from ‘bride-ale’. In this period, cake was more akin to brioche, and contained expensive ingredients such as sugar, spices and exotic dried fruit – definitely a luxury. Cakes and ale parties were occasional treats for most – and strictly off-limits to Puritans. So, in this scene, Sir Toby is ridiculing Malvolio’s prim and proper attitude, calling him a party pooper.
In his play Bartholomew Fair (1614), Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson also highlights the hypocrisy of religious zealots. The Puritan pastor Zeal-of-the-land Busy is a former baker of cakes “served to bridals, may-poles, morrices, and such profane feasts and meetings”. Busy is highly critical of displays of gluttony, such as eating a hog roast at the fair, particularly by women. Yet moments before he launches into a diatribe against eating pork in public, he is caught “fast by the teeth in the cold turkey-pie in the cupboard, with a great white loaf on his left hand, and a glass of malmsey on his right”. White bread and malmsey wine were trappings of a well-to-do lifestyle.
As for Malvolio, he throws his righteousness out of the window the minute he comes to believe – falsely – that Olivia is in love with him. He is described as plumping his proverbial feathers like a “turkeycock” and imagining himself wearing velvet, a fabric reserved for nobility.
A 19th-century illustration of a banquet scene in The Taming of the Shrew. In Shakespeare’s play, Petruchio hopes to soften his wife Katherina’s ‘choler’ (ill-temper) by restricting her diet (Image by Topfoto)
“Did he marry me to famish me?”
Balancing humours
In the early modern period, the prevailing Galenic theory of health held that a person’s physical well-being was governed by four ‘humours’ in the body: blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm. For good health, these humours had to be in balance; if one dominated, it could result in physical or mental issues. For example, people with an excess of black bile were inclined to despondency and introspection, like Jacques in As You Like It.
In The Taming of the Shrew, newly wed Katherina is “Renown’d in Padua for her scolding tongue”. According to the humoural theory of the period, this behaviour would indicate an excess of yellow bile, making her ‘choleric’, or quick to anger.
Such a humoural imbalance might be treated through diet. Foods were also classified by their nature: hot, dry, cold or wet. Essentially, you were what you ate. ‘Choleric’ people such as Katherina were considered to be hot and dry, so foods of a similar nature could potentially exacerbate the imbalance and make these folk even more irritable.
At the beginning of Act IV, Katherina’s husband, Petruchio, orders the removal from the table of some overdone mutton because it “engenders choler, planteth anger”.
Later in the same act, Petruchio’s manservant, Grumio, offers Katherina a series of tempting foods culminating in a dish of beef and mustard – but retracts all of these in turn, deeming them too choleric. Exasperated and hungry, Katherina chases Grumio from the room, shouting: “Go, get thee gone, thou false deluding slave, That feed’st me with the very name of meat.”
By denying Katherina sustenance, Petruchio is hoping to correct her behaviour and rebalance her humours. Clearly, he was not familiar with the concept of being ‘hangry’.
A Georgian print shows proud Welshman Fluellen forcing the sneery English ensign Pistol (left) to eat a raw leek – with potentially unpleasant health consequences – in Henry V (Image by Getty Images)
"If you can mock a leek, you can eat a leek"
National pride
In Shakespeare’s day, experts on dietary theory regarded leeks as food for rustics who had strong constitutions – they were unsuitable for more gentrified folk. At best, when cooked in a pottage, leeks had a diuretic effect – good for drawing out phlegm. At worst, eating them could cause toothache, flatulence, headaches and nightmares. So leeks, particularly in their raw state, were best avoided – which may explain why they feature in so few recipes found in early modern cookbooks.
For the Welsh, however, the leek was an emblem of national pride. Leeks were worn in Monmouth caps on Saint David’s Day (1 March) to commemorate the Welsh victory over the Saxons in the sixth century. So in Henry V, the Welsh captain Fluellen is incensed when the ensign Pistol mocks that emblem, and jibes that the Welshman eats his leek with bread and salt, thereby demoting it to a basic food stuff.
In Act 5, Scene 1, Fluellen exacts his revenge by beating Pistol with a raw leek then forcing him to eat it, exclaiming: “Because, look you, you do not love it, nor your affections and your appetites and your digestions does not agree with it, I would desire you to eat it.”
Though this scene undoubtedly has comic undertones, Shakespeare’s audiences would also have been well aware of the potential consequences for Pistol’s health.
Women make butter in an illustration from a medieval health treatise. People from the Low Countries were known for their love of butter, which was thought to ward off colic (Image by Topfoto)
“I will rather trust a Fleming with my butter”
Attitudes to immigrants
Food was often used to highlight cultural stereotypes. For example, the Flemish and Dutch were renowned for their love of butter. In Ben Jonson’s play Volpone (c1605/06), Mosca says: “You shall ha’ some will swallow / A melting heir, as glibly, as your Dutch / Will pills of butter, and ne’re purge for’t.” So: dishonest people swindle the naive without remorse – or as blithely as the Dutch eat butter.
Foreign characters were often played for laughs, but some food references reveal deeper prejudices. In Sir Thomas More, attributed to Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle with revisions by others including Shakespeare, xenophobic English merchants decry immigrants for introducing parsnips into the country. The fear is that these “strange roots” grown in manure cause disease: “Trash, trash; they breed sore eyes, and tis enough to infect the city with the palsey.”
That play also expresses a fear that immigrants in London were eating more than their fair share of food, and stealing local people’s livelihoods: “For so it is that aliens and strangers eat the bread from the fatherless children, and take the living from all the artificers and the intercourse from all the merchants, whereby poverty is so much increased.” Such lines reflect attitudes of the day to foreigners in England.
Sweet potato, shown here, was an exotic luxury in Shakespeare’s time, and believed to have aphrodisiac properties (Image by Bridgeman)
“Let the sky rain potatoes!”
Exotic aphrodisiacs
Modern theatregoers watching The Merry Wives of Windsor may be puzzled by Sir John Falstaff’s line invoking a bombardment of potatoes – particularly in what is supposed to be a scene of seduction or, as Falstaff puts it, “a tempest of provocation”. But in Shakespeare’s day, certain foods were believed to have aphrodisiac properties – among them the exotic potato, along with the eryngo (sea holly) roots also mentioned in this speech.
The tubers invoked in Shakespeare’s play were most likely what was then known as the Spanish variety, or sweet potatoes. At that time, these were viewed as novelty foods and, therefore, luxuries, not staples. They were often preserved with sugar – also considered a lust-inducing ingredient – and aromatics such as rosewater.
One 16th-century cook, Thomas Dawson, included potatoes in his recipe for ‘A Tart That Is a Courage to a Man or Woman’, along with quinces (another aphrodisiac), sugar, spices and cock-sparrow brains. The recipe ends with the instruction: “So let it boyle till it be something bigge”. This probably isn’t a euphemism for anything saucy – but, given the lusty nature of the ingredients, who’s to say what Dawson is really driving at?
Incidentally, during this period parsnips were also believed to promote lustful urges – another strike against the foreigners who introduced that root vegetable, and who were often viewed as being lascivious.
A colourised 16th-century woodcut shows a couple being served food and drink while frolicking in a bath. Stewed prunes were associated with brothels, possibly based on a belief that they helped protect against sexually transmitted diseases (Image by Alamy)
“I cannot abide the smell of hot meat since”
Witty innuendo
While some foods were believed to boost sexual appetites and performance, others were considered to provide protection from associated risks.
For example, unlikely as it seems today, in earlier times stewed prunes were associated with prostitutes and brothels. In the satirical poem The Knave of Harts (1612) by Samuel Rowlands, a “whoring knave” is served with ‘‘Burnt wine, stew’d Prunes, a Puncke [prostitute] to solace him”.
Why the reference to prunes here? One theory is that they were believed to protect against sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis.
Links between prostitution and food don’t end with prunes. Take the following line spoken by Abraham Slender in The Merry Wives of Windsor: “I bruised my shin th’ other day with playing at sword and dagger with a master of fence – three veneys for a dish of stewed prunes – and, by my troth, I cannot abide the smell of hot meat since.”
The first part implies that he is talking about a fencing match – but what on earth do prunes and hot meat have to do with swordplay? The reference to stewed prunes suggests that Slender is in fact talking about an episode in a brothel. In addition, prostitutes were often compared to joints of meat such as mutton – hence the end of his comment. When the Hostess in Henry IV, Part 2 quips: “What’s a joint of mutton or two in a whole Lent?” she’s saying that a dalliance with a prostitute (or two) can do no harm, even for the virtuous.
So the “hot meat” to which Slender refers is a sex worker, and veney is an archaic English word meaning a bout or thrust. Essentially, he is talking about a poor sexual encounter with a prostitute. So why not have Slender say more plainly: “I had a bad experience with a prostitute, and now I’m sworn off all women”?
Given the sexual innuendo prevalent in early modern plays, it seems unlikely that the use of food references to allude to sex was an attempt to avoid censorship – in fact, blasphemy and political comments were more likely to upset the authorities. In any case, the meaning of these phrases was entirely transparent at the time. Rather, food references – in the comedies, particularly – injected added wit into dialogue.
Sam Bilton is a food historian, author and podcaster. Her latest book is Much Ado About Cooking: Delicious Shakespearean Feasts for Every Occasion (OH, 2025)
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This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
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