Today, the expression “cakes and ale” is synonymous with “the good life” and is a commonly used metaphor for earthly pleasures. The word “cake” also has connotations of something good. The origin is commonly attributable to Sir Toby Belch in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, who asks Malvolio:

Out o’ tune, sir: ye lie. Art any more than a steward?

Dost though think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?

Evidence, however, suggests that the idea of “cakes and ale” is much older, as it appears several times in a version of the ancient Book of the Dead, a funerary text containing instructions and advice to help the deceased pass into the afterlife. The following extract comes from the version known as The Papyrus of Ani, written c. 1240 bce and translated by E.A. Wallis Budge in 1913:

…says the deceased to the god Thoth: ‘But let the state of the spirits be given unto me instead of water, and air, and the satisfying of the longings of love, and let quietness of heart be given unto me instead of cakes and ale.’

Cakes and Ale has been the title of three books of note, written, chronologically, by Douglas W. Jerrold (1842), Edward Spencer (1897), and W. Somerset Maugham (1930).