cockle-bread

English

Noun

cockle-bread (uncountable)

  1. (obsolete) Bread made from wild grain.
    • 1884, Hardwicke's Science-gossip - Volume 20, page 150:
      When St. Bernard founded his abbey, near Clairvaux, he and his thirteen companions lived on barley, or cockle-bread, with boiled beech leaves as vegetables, while they were employed grubbing up the forest, and in building huts for their habitation.
  2. A form of bread used as a love charm, variously described as being kneaded with the knees or buttocks, or simply shaped to look like buttocks.
    • 1595, George Peele, The Old Wife's Tale:
      Fair maiden, white and red, Comb me smooth and stroke my head, And though shalt have some cockle-bread.
    • 1878, Notes and Queries, page 152:
      The very homely pastime of cockle-bread may, or may not, have been named from this foreign cake, but need not here be further alluded to.
    • 1994, Paul Spinrad, The RE/Search Guide to Bodily Fluids:
      A European custom had young women prepare "cockle-bread," a food intended to excite men's passion, by sitting on dough and wiggling around to knead it, sometimes reciting a rhyme in the process ("Up with my heels and down with my head/And this is the way to mould cockle-bread" is an example).
    • 1999, J. K. Knight, The End of Antiquity: Archaeology, Society and Religion AD, page 123:
      They recall the much later English 'cockle bread', one of many methods used by girls to divine the names of their future husbands.

See also
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