Author: Eric Grundhauser / Source: Atlas Obscura
To a modern ear, cockle bread sounds… kind of funny. But as it turns out, the lore surrounding this bawdy baked good, which later morphed into a children’s nursery rhyme, was just as naughty in its day as it sounds today, just not for the reasons you might think.
The idea of cockle bread as a product of sexy baking stems almost entirely from the 17th-century writer John Aubrey’s Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme, a text from the 1680s that collected a number of folk customs. In his collection, Aubrey describes a sort of performance where young women would hike up their skirts and pretend to knead bread with their butt cheeks, singing:
My granny is sick, and now is dead,
And we’ll go mould some cockle bread.
Up with my heels and down with my head,
And this is the way to mould cockle bread.
According to Aubrey’s account, making cockle bread was “a wanton sport” for “young wenches.” As to whether any actual bread was ever made this way, Aubrey mentions that the custom was based on an older tradition wherein a young lover would actually knead dough with her butt and then bake it up and serve it to the one she pined for, like a magic spell.
Still, historical cockle…
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