When you consider some of the most immersive fantasy worlds, a key factor is total sensory immersion. World-building comes alive with sounds, sights, sensations, scents, and, of course, tastes. Food and drink are major in developing any setting, giving you a sense of what the culture and daily lives of its fictional inhabitants are like. The Harry Potter series is a prime example of how magical, mouthwatering goodies can make a story’s setting all the more real. Not only does the food at Hogwarts sound delicious—it's positively enchanting, with sweets and candies that can make you levitate, spit fire, and more.
The food at Hogwarts, the sweets the students love, and the accompanying drinks all enrich the world of Harry Potter. Though witches and wizards still cook and eat Muggle food, they have tons of magical food options, too.
Popular drinks of the wizarding world
Wizards and witches have distinct tastes in beverages. Among the most common drinks at Hogwarts is pumpkin juice, accompanying student meals in the Great Hall.
In their third year, in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry, Ron, and Hermione are allowed to start visiting Hogsmeade. Though Harry is at first unable to go because he didn’t get a permission slip, Fred and George give him a helping hand by passing on the Marauder’s Map. It divulges multiple secret ways to get in and out of the castle. Harry goes to the Three Broomsticks pub in Hogsmeade and tries Butterbeer with Ron and Hermione. It’s a delicious common drink beloved by the younger Hogwarts students.
From Chapter 10: The Marauder's Map
Performed by Jim Dale
From Chapter 10: The Marauder's Map
Performed by Stephen Fry
People who are of age in the wizarding world are just as likely to have a Gillywater or a Firewhisky at the Three Broomsticks or the Leaky Cauldron in Diagon Alley.
Sweets beloved by Hogwarts students
Sweets play a major part in fun and leisure time at Hogwarts. Luckily for the school’s young wizards and witches, there are plenty of places to stock up on sugary treats.
The Hogwarts Express trolley
When Harry first travels to Hogwarts in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, he’s eager to get as many candies as he can from the train’s sweets trolley, sampling both wizarding cuisine and a taste of freedom from the Dursleys. With a pocket full of Galleons, he’s eager to dive in.
The Hogwarts trolley offers Harry an early lesson on the types of foods available in the wizarding world. Also eager to bond with his first real friend, Ron Weasley, Harry gets everything he can carry from the trolley.
Here, there’s a wide array of snacks available to students, purveyed by the Trolley witch, including:
Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans: These treats are similar to Muggle jellybeans. They have the regular flavors you’d expect of a jellybean, like chocolate, peppermint, and marmalade. But an unsuspecting snacker may also come across spinach, liver, and tripe. When Dumbledore visits Harry in the hospital wing, he tells Harry he once came across a vomit-flavored one, so he’s less put-out when he gets an earwax-flavored bean.
From Chapter Six: The Journey from Platform Nine and Three-Quarters
Performed by Jim Dale
From Chapter Six: The Journey from Platform Nine and Three-Quarters
Performed by Stephen Fry
Chocolate Frogs: Chocolate Frogs are beloved by witches and wizards because each frog comes with a card. The card features a famous witch or wizard with a list of fun facts, and Hogwarts students like to trade cards. Some of the famous witches and wizards on the cards include Agrippa, Ptolemy, and Albus Dumbledore.
From Chapter Six: The Journey from Platform Nine and Three-Quarters
Performed by Jim Dale
From Chapter Six: The Journey from Platform Nine and Three-Quarters
Performed by Stephen Fry
Licorice Wands: Chewy sticks of licorice shaped like slender wands, these sweets are perfect for pretending—but they won’t cast a single spell.
Drooble’s Best Blowing Gum: When you blow bubbles with this enchanted gum, they are large, violet-blue, and hang around for days. They don’t pop like regular Muggle chewing gum.
Pumpkin Pasty: A pastry with a sweet pumpkin filling, likely similar in shape to a Cornish pasty.
Cauldron Cake: An appropriately themed treat enjoyed by students on the Hogwarts Express.
From Chapter Six: The Journey from Platform Nine and Three-Quarters
Performed by Jim Dale
From Chapter Six: The Journey from Platform Nine and Three-Quarters
Performed by Stephen Fry
Honeydukes Sweets
The sweets shop in Hogsmeade, Honeydukes, is a favorite stop among Hogwarts students. When students go to Hogsmeade on the weekends, they overwhelm the tiny shop.
In addition to fudge, nougat, and hundreds of chocolate flavors, Honeydukes also houses Special Effects sweets:
Toothflossing Stringmints, handy mints that help dental-hygiene-conscious wizards and witches get in between their teeth
Fizzing Whizzbees, sherbet balls that allow the magical snacker to levitate a few inches off the ground
Pepper Imps, devilish little goodies that make your mouth start smoking
Ice Mice, curious sweets that set your teeth chattering and squeaking like a rodent companion
Peppermint Toads, minty cream sweets that hop around in one’s belly after consumption
Sugar-spun quills, the perfect snack for Hogwarts students to sneak into class without getting caught
Exploding bonbons, sweets with a bang, these volatile confections have bite
Jelly Slugs, gummy confections shaped like, well, slugs, that, despite their name, were quite popular with Hogwarts students
Acid Pops, ideal for the witch or wizard with a taste for the extremely sour, were known to burn a hole in the tongue with their potency
From Chapter 10: The Marauder's Map
Performed by Jim Dale
From Chapter 10: The Marauder's Map
Performed by Stephen Fry
Fred and George’s Skiving Snackboxes
During Fred and George’s seventh year at Hogwarts in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, they start developing products that they’ll eventually sell at their joke shop, Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes.
The Skiving Snackboxes are sweets capable of causing brief illness, allowing Hogwarts students to skip lessons when they wanted to. The sweets have two colors: the orange end, which you eat to make yourself sick, and the purple end to cure your sickness.
Fred and George demonstrate their successful development in the Gryffindor common room, and are immediately able to drum up interest in selling for their future joke shop. True to their mischievous nature, the twins chose names that hint at each sweet’s intended effect:
Nosebleed Nougat
Fever Fudge
Puking Pastille
Fainting Fancies
Chapter Six: The Most Noble and Ancient House of Black
Performed by Jim Dale
Chapter Six: The Most Noble and Ancient House of Black
Performed by Stephen Fry
Students use Skiving Snackboxes as a handy tool to get out of class. Many students also use them to prank Professor Umbridge in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. The popularity of the Snackboxes persists once the brick-and-mortar shop Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes opens in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
The Hogwarts Great Hall menu
One of the most exciting moments for Harry at the beginning of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is the start-of-term feast. In his time growing up with the Dursleys, Harry was usually left with Dudley’s scraps and often sent to bed without dinner as a punishment. For Harry, regular access to delicious food is a huge benefit to living at Hogwarts. Though the food doesn't cause magical levitation or fire-breathing like some of the enchanted sweets Harry had experienced, the Muggle food available in the Great Hall during the Hogwarts feasts is unbelievably tasty.
From Chapter Seven: The Sorting Hat
Performed by Jim Dale
From Chapter Seven: The Sorting Hat
Performed by Stephen Fry
Harry is overwhelmed by his own appetite during his first meal at Hogwarts after receiving the good news that he’s been sorted into Gryffindor. The delectable dishes available during the annual start-of-term feast include:
Roast beef
Chicken
Pork chops
Lamb chops
Sausages
Bacon
Steak
Boiled potatoes
Roast potatoes
Fries
Yorkshire pudding
Peas
Carrots
Gravy
Ketchup
Peppermint humbugs
After dinner is done, the main courses magically fade from plates and dishes, leaving clean settings for dessert to appear in its place. There are ice cream, pastries, and pies available, but Harry only has eyes for treacle tart. It's a sweet pastry filled with golden syrup, breadcrumbs, and a hint of lemon, often served with cream or custard.
For Harry’s first Halloween at Hogwarts, the kitchens bake a ton of different pumpkin treat options that students can smell throughout the day. His next exciting holiday is Christmas dinner, once again full of incredible treats that Harry can hardly believe he gets to eat. Alongside the succulent food, they enjoy wizard crackers, which aren't food but are fun. When pulled, the crackers emit a loud bang, engulf diners in blue smoke, and release prizes like hats and mice.
A special gathering in the Great Hall is the Welcoming Feast in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which is organized around the arrival of international students from Beauxbatons and Durmstrang for the Triwizard Tournament. The Hogwarts kitchens whip up regionally specific dishes, like bouillabaisse, a French fish stew.
From Chapter 16: The Goblet of Fire
Performed by Jim Dale
From Chapter 16: The Goblet of Fire
Performed by Stephen Fry
The Hogwarts kitchens
The savory array of food provided to the Hogwarts students is all prepared by a small team of house-elves. The Hogwarts kitchens are located directly below the Great Hall. In the kitchens, they have four house tables where they arrange the food, which is how it magically appears up in the Great Hall.
From Chapter 21: The House-Elf Liberation Front
Performed by Jim Dale
From Chapter 21: The House-Elf Liberation Front
Performed by Stephen Fry
The Hogwarts kitchens are in the basement near the Hufflepuff common room. Hermione takes Harry and Ron there, after learning about how to access the kitchens from Fred and George. They find Dobby, the Malfoys’ former house-elf, and Winky, Barty Crouch Sr’s former house-elf, working in the kitchens. The house-elves are happy to offer snacks to anyone who visits the kitchens, letting Ron load up his pockets with cream cakes and pies.
Wait, what do the ghosts of Hogwarts eat?
Hogwarts’s ghosts sadly can’t enjoy all that scrumptious food. During the start-of-term feast in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the Gryffindor House ghost, Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington, bemoans that he can’t eat.
Harry soon befriends Nicholas, also known as Nearly Headless Nick. In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry agrees to attend Nick’s deathday party, along with Ron and Hermione. The deathday party coincides with the Halloween feast, but since Harry promised to go to the deathday party, they skip out on the feast.
The three students are the only living attendees of the party, so they’re a little confused. When they approach the banquet table, they quickly realize none of the food is appropriate to eat. The fish is rotten, cakes are burnt to a crisp, cheese is moldy, the haggis is covered in bugs, among more disgusting surprises. Hermione correctly surmises that rot, which would be disgusting to humans, gives food a stronger flavor enjoyed by the ghosts when they pass through it. Harry, Ron, and Hermione go in search of something more digestible after the party.
From Chapter Eight: The Deathday Party
Performed by Jim Dale
From Chapter Eight: The Deathday Party
Performed by Stephen Fry
Eateries of the wizarding world
Diagon Alley is a street in London known only to witches and wizards. Hogwarts students and adults shop on this street for everything they need for their magical lives, and they can also stop for a drink and a bite to eat at places, like:
The Leaky Cauldron Pub: This pub, minded by an old man named Tom, is found on a street in London and houses the entrance to Diagon Alley in the back. In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry spends the second half of his summer in one of the pub's rooms before he returns to Hogwarts.
Florean Fortescue's Ice Cream Parlour: When Harry is staying at the Leaky Cauldron, he regularly goes to have sundaes at the ice cream parlour, and Florean Fortescue helps Harry with his homework.
From Chapter Four: The Leaky Cauldron
Performed by Jim Dale
From Chapter Four: The Leaky Cauldron
Performed by Stephen Fry
When the Hogwarts students go to Hogsmeade, they frequent a variety of dining establishments, including:
The Three Broomsticks: A pub beloved by Hogwarts students and teachers alike, owned and operated by Madame Rosmerta.
The Hog’s Head: A seedier pub down the road in Hogsmeade, run by Aberforth Dumbledore.
Madam Puddifoot's Tea Shop: A classic date spot for Hogwarts students to have tea, coffee, and cakes.
From Chapter 25: The Beetle at Bay
Performed by Jim Dale
Chapter 25: The Beetle at Bay
Performed by Stephen Fry
At home with the Weasleys
Another place Harry loves to tuck into his favorite meals is the Weasley home, the Burrow. Ron’s mother, Mrs. Weasley, is an excellent cook. When Harry first goes to stay with Ron and his family in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, he’s overwhelmed with the bounty of yummy food she makes every day.
Every Christmas, in addition to a handknit sweater, Mrs. Weasley sends Harry a special treat. From homemade fudge to plum cake, she treats him like another son with plentiful gifts of food. Mrs. Weasley employs her talent with a wand as she cooks. She also has a collection of magical cookbooks, including Charm Your Own Cheese, Enchantment in Baking, and One Minute Feasts—It’s Magic!.
From Chapter Three: The Burrow
Performed by Jim Dale
From Chapter Three: The Burrow
Performed by Stephen Fry
