Vulva Bread Spell March 17, 2017
Author: Beach Combing | in : Medieval, Modern , trackback
Location: this spell seems to have been used throughout the west Midlands and North of England.
Aim: to seduce a man or to cement a sexual relationship with a man.
Ingredients: flour, water, salt, a good sense of rhythm and an ample backside.
Method
(i) young woman makes bread
(ii) when the bread is ready to knead, the girl climbs up onto the table and kneads the bread with her nether regions: ‘gather up their knees and their Coates with their hands as high as they can, and then they wabble to and fro with their Buttocks, as if they were kneading of Dough with their arses…’
(iii) as they knead the girl says ‘My dame is sick and gone to bed, And I’ll go mould my cockle bread’. ‘Cockle’ should be a mussel but could also be the vagina. Wright did not have the courage to include this in his Dialect Dictionary but he does have a reference to cockelty bread: see below.
(iv) bake the vulva bread.
(v) serve the vulva bread to the man you love: not clear if the method of the breadmaking is shared or not with the eater.
Dangers: hairs in the crust?
Antiquity
The recipe above is based on a spell recorded by Aubrey in the seventeenth century. Interestingly Aubrey himself noted that a similar spell was outlawed in an eleventh-century ecclesiastical text where women ‘subigere panem clunibus’, were not to knead dough with their behinds.
Help
It would be interesting to see if there were any continental records of this spell from Aubrey’s time. It would be fascinating, too, to see if any Victorian was brave enough to record this wonderful nonsense: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com The game described by Wright below sounds like it might be a curious descendant in the English playground: note he quotes from Aubrey at the end.
For references and explanation of the project and tag index: Beach’s Book of Shadows.
30 Mar 2017: someone kindly wrote in but this incompetent blogger lost the email. I’ve reconstructed from memory. There is apparently a Japanese love spell where a woman undresses and well… Why don’t you read.
