Lorne sausage

Square sausage (lower right) served with black pudding, baked beans, mushrooms and fried bread

The lorne sausage, also known as square sausage or slice sausage, is a traditional Scottish food usually made from ground meat, rusk and spices. It is commonplace in traditional Scottish breakfasts.

History

The exact origins of the lorne sausage remain unclear, but it remains a favourite in Scottish cooked breakfasts and is often eaten in the Scottish variant of the full breakfast or in a breakfast roll. The sausage is also an appropriate size to make a sandwich using one or two slices from a plain loaf of bread.

In 2009 there was a campaign to grant protected status to the lorne sausage, meaning it could only bear the name 'lorne sausage' if it was made in Scotland.

Preparation

Sausage meat – in this case a mixture of pork and beef – is minced and then mixed with rusk and spices and set in a rectangular cuboid tin. Once set, it is sliced into pieces generally about 10 cm square by about 1 cm thick. The sausage is rarely a perfect square given the minced state of the meat. Unlike other forms of traditional sausage, square sausage is not encased in anything and needs to be tightly packed into a mould to hold it together.

Name

There are two main theories as to where the name of the sausage originates:

• Named after Tommy Lorne, a Scottish music hall comedian of the 1920s.
• Named after the region of Lorne in Argyll. This is a more likely explanation as advertisements for 'Lorne Sausage' have been found in newspapers as early as 1896, only 6 years after the birth of Tommy Lorne.

See also

• List of sausages
• Breakfast sausage
• Scrapple
• Goetta