Cockle-bread

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.

Fair maiden, white and red, Comb me smooth and stroke my head, And though shalt have some cockle-bread.

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.

A 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).

They recall the much later English 'cockle bread', one of many methods used by girls to divine the names of their future husbands.