Richard McComb samples a couple of real love potions in the form of cocktails made for the Royal Shakespeare Theatre’s Rooftop Restaurant.

If music be the food of love, play on – just make sure you’ve got a cocktail to hand.

Rob Hall, assistant bar manager of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new Rooftop Restaurant in Stratford-upon-Avon, wanted to make some special love potions for Valentine’s Day. Fortunately, the RSC’s chief associate director Gregory Doran was on hand for expert advice and turned to his own recently published book, The Shakespeare Almanac, for inspiration.

There is a feast of culinary references among the Bard’s plays. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare mentions a number of sweetmeats and confectioneries, Falstaff announcing in Act 5: “Let the sky rain potatoes; let it thunder to the tune of Greensleeves; hail kissing comfits and snow enrigoes. Let there come a tempest of provocation, I will shelter me here’.”

Kissing comfits were perfumed sugar plums and were used as breath sweeteners. Enrigoes were made from the candied roots of sea holly, which had aphrodisiac properties, as did sweet potatoes.

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare writes about young lovers, lust, longing and magic: “I know a bank where the wild thyme blows/Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows/Quite o’er canopied with luscious woodbine,/With sweet musk roses and with eglantine/There sleeps Titania some hour of the night/Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight.”

The leaves of the eglantine, which smell of apples when crushed, were also used as breath fresheners. Again in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare writes: “Yet mark’d I where the bolt of Cupid fell;/It fell upon a little western flower,/Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound,/ And maidens call it love-in-idleness.”