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Talk:Cockle bread

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Astonishingly enough, this looks real -- many Google entries. NawlinWiki 15:10, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Oh yes, it was once quite real, though now I wonder if the practice has died out. In "A Glossary of Words Used in the Neighbourhood of Sheffield" (1888), edited Sidney Oldall Addy, we find:
COCKLETY-BREAD, sb.
‘The moulding [of] cocklety-bread is a sport amongst hoydenish girls not quite extinct. It consists in sitting on the ground, raising the knees and clasping them with the hands, and then using an undulatory motion as if they were kneading dough, accompanying the motion with a chant of which the following are the words:—
My granny is sick and now is dead,
And we'll go mould some cocklety-bread;
Up with the heels and down with the head,
And that is the way to make cocklety-bread.
It comes from the depths of antiquity, and had formerly a purpose beyond what now belongs to it when it is merely a sport, somewhat wanton. For dough thus moulded when baked was given as a love charm. This appears from one of the questions in the Penetentiale of Burchard, Bishop of Worms, who lived under the Emperor Henry, A.D. 1020, as I find in Aubrey’s Remains of Gentilism,’
Hunter s MS.
B9 (talk) 07:53, 13 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]