Lorne sausage

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

The lorne sausage, also known as a square sausage or a sliced sausage is a traditional Scottish food usually made from ground meat and rusk. It is commonplace in traditional Scottish breakfasts and is said to originate in Lorne, Argyll.

History

The exact origins of the sausage remain unclear however, the lorne sausage 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 the ideal 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 – which is a mixture of pork and beef – is minced and then mixed with rusk and spices and is set in a rectangular cuboid tin. Once set, it is sliced into pieces generally about 10cm square by about 1cm 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 historic Scottish region of Lorne, part of modern day Argyll and Bute.