Meanings
- obsoleteuncountableBread made from wild grain.
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.
1884, Hardwicke's Science-gossip - Volume 20, page 150 - uncountableA 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.
Fair maiden, white and red, Comb me smooth and stroke my head, And though shalt have some cockle-bread.
1595, George Peele, The Old Wife's Tale3 more examples
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.
1878, Notes and Queries, page 152A 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).
1994, Paul Spinrad, The RE/Search Guide to Bodily FluidsThey recall the much later English 'cockle bread', one of many methods used by girls to divine the names of their future husbands.
1999, J. K. Knight, The End of Antiquity: Archaeology, Society and Religion AD, page 123
Cite this entry
cockle-bread. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/cockle-bread
“cockle-bread.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/cockle-bread. Accessed November 3, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “cockle-bread,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/cockle-bread.
Source: cockle-bread on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.