Cockle bread

British corn or wheat bread

Cockle bread was an inferior type of British corn or wheat bread mixed with "cockle weed". In the 17th century a practice known as "moulding" cockle bread had a sexual connotation. Cockle bread is also mentioned in a 19th century nursery rhyme.

The play The Old Wives' Tale by George Peele, first published in 1595, has a reference to "cockle bread". The editor of a 20th century edition of the play, Charles Whitworth, points to the "cockle" as a weed found in corn and wheat fields, and suggests that "cockle bread" was possibly an inferior bread, made from those grains, with the weed mixed into it. William Carew Hazlitt writing in Faith and Folklore: a dictionary in 1905, gives the same explanation of "Cockle Bread" as Whitworth.

In the 17th century a sexual connotation is attached not to the bread itself but to "a dance that involved revealing the buttocks and simulating sexual activity" which was known as "moulding" cockle bread. John Aubrey writes of "young wenches" indulging in a "wanton sport" called "moulding of Cocklebread" where they would "get upon a Tableboard, and as they gather up their knees and their Coates with their hands as high as they can, and then they wabble to and fro with the Buttocks as if they were kneading of Dough with their Arses".</poem>
Aubrey compares this, writing "I did imagine nothing to have been in this but mere wantonness of youth but I find in Buchardus's book Methodus Confitendi one of the articles of interrogating a young woman is, if she did ever subjugere panem clunibus, and then bake it, and give it to the one she loved to eat".