Powsowdie noun soup made with a sheep’s head
‘Food was beginning to be brought out: tureens of powsowdie and hotch potch - and an enormous tub of soup à la Reine, a clear compliment to the guest of honour …’ (A Breath of Snow and Ashes)
Powsowdie is an alternative name for sheep’s-heid broth. Renfrewshire author William Taylor, in his Poem published in 1787, rhymes: ‘In haf an hour hese get his mess O’ crowdy mowdy, An’ fresh powsowdy’. Crowdy-mowdy is probably, as crowdie, ‘a mixture of oatmeal and cold water, eaten raw’. Sounds delicious…
In 1894 Donald MacLeod, writing in his Past Worthies of the Lennox, gives us a spelling variant with ‘Speldins [dried haddock or whiting] and haddocks, sheep heid and wilks, Wi’ swats and guid powrowdie’. By the twentieth century, Hugh McDiarmid records in his Penny-Wheep (1926): ‘Wi’ powsoudie or drummock, Lapper-milk kebbuck and farle’. Drummock is also a mixture of raw oatmeal and cold water.
Moving on to the twenty-first century, a book review published in the Times of August 2003 notes varieties of Scottish food unknown south of the border: ‘Scotland: land of powsowdie, cullen skink, cloutie dumpling and mealie puddings, of clapshot, bashed neeps and stoved howtowdie (a large chicken for the pot) wi’ drappit eggs. Now OK, these names may not exactly sing. But isn’t it odd, in these cosmopolitan times when olive oil and pesto are kitchen staples, that to many of us south of Carlisle Scottish food seems so alien?’
As with much traditional Scottish fare, powsowdie is no longer on restaurant menus and only the most adventurous home cook would attempt to make it. It does live on in in the collective memory, however, as reported in the Herald of June 2015: ‘While some foods such as cullen skink, crannachan and clootie dumpling have lived on, others such as powsowdie (a sheep heid’s broth), crappit heids (haddock heads and livers) and cruddy butter (a cheese) have all but disappeared in the mists of time’.
Finally, in the Herald of March 2019, an article appeared bemoaning the lack of availability of the clabby dhu (horse mussel): ‘Eventually, they joined dishes such as potted heid and powsowdie - sheep’s head broth - known only to grandparents and those with a taste for very traditional Scottish cooking’.