cockle-bread

Noun

cockle-bread (uncountable)

1. (obsolete) Bread 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
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.
   • 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 Tale
   • 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 152