Gundy
March 22nd 2025
This sweet treat is defined as: “A kind of toffee or candy made from brown sugar, syrup or treacle, butter and flavouring”. Sounds like a dentist’s nightmare!
The term is first recorded in David M Moir’s The Life of Mansie Wauch (1828): “Instead of gundy, I sold my thrums [threads] to Mrs Walnut for a penny, with which I bought . . . a sheet of paper and a pen”.
It also appears in J. J. Bell’s Wee McGreegor (1902), where a character is admonished for their large appetite: “Ye micht think shame o yersel, wantin gundy efter ye’ve ett twa aiples an a pie forbye”.
Unfortunately, The Scotsman noted in September 1910 that: “Among sweets, ‘Gundy’, a supple stick of treacle toffy, seems to have succumbed in the struggle of existence among the more refined modern temptations”. This is reflected in the word’s sparing use since then, though it appears in Tatties An’ Herreen’ (1961) by ‘Castlegreen’: “’E bairns may be chock-fil o sweeties an trock [rubbishy food] An fylan’ thur bowgies wi gundy”.
If you’d like to try making your own gundy, Florence Marian McNeill provides a recipe in her much-loved record of Scottish cuisine, The Scots Kitchen (1929). Described as an “Old-fashioned Sweetmeat”, she explains that the toffee could be flavoured with aniseed or cinnamon and was either broken into shards once set or formed into thin round sticks as soon as it was cool enough to handle. Perhaps it’s time for a revival?
Dictionaries of the Scots Language would like to thank Bob Dewar for illustrating our Scots Word of the Week feature.
