Dictionaries of the Scots Language defines macallum as “an ice flavoured with raspberry juice”. An early example comes from A J Cronin’s Hatter’s Castle (1931): “Now she was eating her macallum, a delicious concoction of ice-cream and raspberry juice”. This is followed by an excerpt from Helen W Pryde’s Maisie McFlannel’s Romance (1951): “Ah’m as cool as a macallum. It’s the wife that’s feelin’ the heat”. (The McFlannels was a popular radio serial which aired between 1939-54.)
Significantly earlier (1899), the Paisley and Renfrewshire Gazette reported a dispute in a local ice-cream parlour: “It so happened that the man in charge of the shop had no knowledge of English, beyond ‘slider,’ ‘Macallum,’ ‘ice-cream,’ and ‘ginger,’ as well as the relative values of pounds, shillings, and other useful articles of similar breed”. The disturbance involved men in the shop throwing sliders at each other.
In 2012, the late Archbishop of Glasgow, Philip Tartaglia, wrote in Glasgow Now: “My father had a café which took up most of his time and all of us took our turn behind the counter, learning the skilled art of producing a macallum - which you may know is an ice cream in a dish topped off with a wafer”.
Similarly, blogger piningforthewest, wrote a post in summer 2014 about revisiting the University Café in Glasgow: “I couldn’t resist asking the young girl who served us for a McCallum, but sadly she didn’t know what it was – one of the older staff did though… It’s just a vanilla ice with raspberry sauce.”
Scots Word of the Week comes from Dictionaries of the Scots Language. Visit DSL Online at https://dsl.ac.uk.
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