Cockles are heart-shaped candies with phrases like / Love You and You’re Mine embossed on their sugary surfaces. Cockles are also edible bivalve molluscs that may be eaten raw but are usually cooked like mussels. The connection between these two cockles is a bit circuitous. In the seventeenth century, anatomists dissecting human cadavers noticed that the ventricles of the human heart are shaped like cockle-shells. Accordingly, they termed these ventricles cockles and this appellation eventually gave rise to the expression, To warm the cockles of the heart. Through this association with the cardiovascular system, the name of the mollusc was then transferred to the heart-shaped candies. Bakers will also know that cockles are the bubbles and blisters that form on the crust of bread as it is baked, a name that probably derives from these bread bubbles being, like ventricles, rounded like shells. Also rounded like shells are cockboats, a small craft whose crew is led by a cock-swain or, in abbreviated form, a coxswain. The ultimate source of all these cockles and cocks is the Greek konkhe, meaning conch shell.
A marine gastropod, also known as a bivalve mollusk, akin to its kin the clam or oyster, safeguarded by a double set of shells replete with prominently protruding ridges which emanate from the base. The cockle, while analogous in culinary usage to its aforementioned brethren, has a comparatively more ubiquitous presence within the European continent as opposed to the United States.
Mussels are a type of small bivalve shellfish that are found in significant quantities along the coasts of the North Atlantic.