White pudding
A white pudding has nothing to do with a dessert. In the Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) it is defined as
“a pudding or sausage stuffed with oatmeal, suet, salt, pepper and onions”.
It is also known as mealie pudding.
Although the Scots diet has long been maligned by many, if you were working the fields from dawn to dusk a high fat and calorific diet made sense for those lucky enough to afford it.
The dish has a long pedigree. One early example in DSL comes from David Herd’s The Ancient and Modern Scots Songs (1769):
“First they ate the white puddings and then they ate the black”.
What appears to be a shopping list is documented by John Galt in his 1833 Howdie [midwife]:
“Mutton-hams, white puddings, salt fish, and half a cheese”.
DSL then skips a century to give us this from the Herald in December 2000:
“A mission was sent out to the local chipper for a white pudding supper”.
Which perhaps was a challenge given this from the Scotsman (2002):
“Remember when a chip shop sold chips and little else? The choice was cod or haddock or possibly, in the more outré chippies, white pudding.”
The next year a description from a visitor sampling local cuisine was recorded in the Edinburgh Evening News (2003):
“In Snax I was offered a choice of sausage, which included square sausage which was nice… then I think they’re called white pudding which I tried for the first time and liked”.
This Scots Word of the Week comes from Dictionaries of the Scots Language.
Visit DSL Online at https://dsl.ac.uk.
Partan bree
Partan bree is another Scottish delicacy defined simply in the Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) as “crab soup”. According to DSL, the type of crab used is “the common edible crab”. (Partan is, of course, the Scots word for a crab.)
The dish was documented in 1909 in the Cookery book of Lady Clark of Tillypronie. DSL also cites this from another cookbook; F Marian McNeill’s The Scots Kitchen (1929):
“Partan Bree with rice and cream intill't [into it]”. It is usually made with crab, crab liquor, rice, cream and/or milk with chives for a garnish.
At what must have been quite a feast, the menu for a dinner given by the Honourable Elizabeth Semple was reported in the Aberdeen Press and Journal of November 1935 and
“… included partan bree, Aberdeen haggis wi’ chappit neep tatties, roast muirfowl, and Scots flummery”.
Another dinner featured in the Aberdeen Evening Express of August 1978, this time described as “A Taste of Orkney”, with the following menu:
“Guests and overseas journalists joined for such traditional Orkney fare as partan bree, Orkney beef, clap shot and bere meal Bannocks”.
And at a Gallowgate pub in January 2020, a Burns’ Night menu was unveiled consisting of:
“Kedgeree Scotch eggs with vinegar peas, locally caught Scottish crab, celeriac and apple on wholemeal bread, served with a mug of partan bree (Scottish crab soup), and sugar-sweet Barras-inspired doughnuts are all on the menu”.
Perhaps partan bree will take over as a starter instead of cockaleekie at some Burns Suppers.
This Scots Word of the Week comes from Dictionaries of the Scots Language.
Visit DSL Online at https://dsl.ac.uk.
Shawlie
The origins of this word are thankfully now mainly historical. Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) defines a shawlie as a woman:
“wearing a shawl instead of a hat, hence applied to working-class women and girls in industrial areas up to about 1925”.
An early written example (from Frederick Niven’s 1914 Justice of the Peace) explains that shawlies are what
“the girls who are to be seen in the neighbourhood of the Trongate of Glasgow, wearing shawls over their heads, are locally called”.
In the summer of 1926 the Edinburgh magazine Broughton, published by the pupils of Broughton Secondary School, carried this vivid description of the Old Town:
“The Canon Gait wi’ its bourachs o’ dram-houffs an’ its rowth o’ shawlie wives”.
Shawlies also appear in Robin Jenkins’ novel The Thistle and the Grail (1954):
“In the third round they had to face a crack Glasgow team; but, encouraged by hundreds of their followers, who had fearlessly escorted them into that enormous lair of gangsters, shawlies, and keelies, they scraped through by a single goal scored by Elrigmuir ten minutes from the end”.
Further afield, in 2014 a reporter for Northern Ireland’s Farming Life recorded:
“I have said before but it will bear repetition: you will get far more sense from an ould farmer leaning on a gate or from an ould shawlie in a health service waiting room than you will get from a consultant who knows only one thing and that is how to charge. And we are all the worse for that”.
This Scots Word of the Week comes from Dictionaries of the Scots Language.
Visit DSL Online at https://dsl.ac.uk.
Miraculous
During this period when perhaps many Scots are enjoying a dry January, we can reflect on one of the many terms we have for being under the influence of alcohol.
In the Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) miraculous is defined as
“a stupefied or incapable condition, especially from drink, very intoxicated”.
It also has a shortened form with various spellings: mirac, maroc and mirack.
The term goes back to the nineteenth century and is exemplified in the following from David Thomson’s Musings Among the Heather (1881):
“The hale lot in a body Had got themsel’s mirac’lous fu’”.
In His Mining Folk (1912) David Rorie describes many states of intoxication:
“A drunk man, if very drunk, is described as mortagious, miracklous, steamin’ wi' drink, or blin’ fou”.
In the late twentieth century, Michael Munro in The Patter (1985) defines it as follows:
“Miaculous. Usually, who knows why, pronounced ‘marockyoolus’, this is a slang term for drunk. Maroc is sometimes heard as a shortened form of this and has nothing to do with tangerines: ‘Ah seen him stotin roon Georgie Square, pur [sic] maroc he wis!’”.
Looking into the shortened form, mirac, revealed the following encounter between a Stornoway sheriff and a Glasgow plumber reported in the Aberdeen Press and Journal of March 1970 under the headline
“Is mirac Gaelic? asks Sheriff”. “I was mirac said a Glasgow plumber when charged with an offence, Stornoway Sheriff Court heard yesterday. And Sheriff Hector Maclean asked: ‘What does he mean by that?’”.
Sadly, the reply has not been recorded.
This Scots Word of the Week comes from Dictionaries of the Scots Language.
Visit DSL Online at https://dsl.ac.uk.
Obligement
I was asked about this term by a legal friend of mine who had come across it meaning a favour or some other act of kindness. Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) defines it as
“a contractual promise or understanding … a bond or promissory note … an obligation”.
Our earliest example of a legal usage dates back to the fifteenth century, from Liber Sancte Marie de Melros (1499):
“Obligement twiching [concerning, relating to] the warrandice of Cambestoun”.
The term is still current, still in use in the late twentieth century and into the twenty-first. The following is an extract from a letter written by a prisoner in Barlinnie published in the Daily Record in April 1996:
“I’m locked up for punishment. I’d gladly give one of the guys laid off my job [laying tarmac] – I'm sure he’d give me a fiver as an obligement!”.
The fruits of the sea were under discussion in The Scotsman of April 2002. Spoots, or razor clams, were being given away by a local Orkney fish merchant. His explanation:
“I don’t sell them, really. I keep a list of those that like them and just get them in as a kind of obligement, maybe 50 or 60 at a time”.
More recently, from the murky world of drugs, there was this report in the John O Groat Journal of July 2022. A quantity of cannabis was discovered in the post. It had been sent by a man who explained
“... that his actions were an obligement for an old girlfriend”.
This Scots Word of the Week was written by Pauline Cairns Speitel.
Visit DSL Online at https://dsl.ac.uk.