Roll and Square Slice: the Lorne Sausage Sandwich

Scottish breakfasts are a heavy affair. Like the “Full English” breakfast, the traditional Scottish breakfast may include a fry-up of link sausages, bacon rashers (back bacon), streaky (belly or side) bacon, white pudding, black pudding, tomatoes, mushrooms, a fried slice or two (pan-fried bread), baked beans (the British version, much less sweet than what we eat in the US–and I prefer them to ours)… often all on the same plate.

The Scottish variant may add some distinctly Scottish items such as haggis or tattie scones or a soft crusty bread known as a morning roll. But possibly the most uniquely Scottish item at a Full Scottish breakfast–or at least in the running for that title along with haggis–is a mixture of minced meat, fat, spices, and rusk or bread crumbs known as Lorne sausage, or sometimes “square sausage” due to its distinctive shape.

What makes a square sausage square is the way that it’s formed. Fatty ground meat–beef usually, or a mixture of beef and pork, are combined with black pepper, mace and/or nutmeg, coriander, and crushed rusk, a dessicated bread product, and stuffed into a plastic wrap (or “cling film” if we’re getting into the spirit of things)-lines bread loaf tin and allowed to set overnight before being sliced into squares–or more sort-of rounded-off trapezoids–around a centimeter or slightly less in thickness.

The fat is important. Some recipes call for grating additional suet or lard into the sausage mixture before placing it in the mold. Descriptions of the sausage almost invariably relate how the sausage slice shrinks to half its original size during the cooking process due to fat rendering. I used a medium-fatty beef and pork mixture, based on many of the recipes I read–and next time I would definitely add more fat to the mix. I will put the recipe I used, which was based on an amalgam of several recipes I read online, at the bottom of this post, but please keep in mind that next time I would grate in probably a good half-pound of suet.

My Lorne sausages, though tasty enough, retained their shape and size fairly well during the cooking process, and while the texture was fine–a little dry and mushy, like a firmer scrapple perhaps, the extra fat could only have improved them.

So of course my first thought for using the square sausages was to serve them in a Full Scottish breakfast, with bacon, white pudding, bangers, tattie scones, fried slices, black pudding, fried tomatoes, mushrooms, and beans. It was my thought that with the leftovers, I could combine slices of Lorne sausage in a roll with white and/or black pudding, bacon, tattie scones, etc., and make a number of the different combination breakfast rolls that I have read about every time I’ve seen square sausage mentioned.

In this endeavor, I made a few major mistakes. First, and most obvious, I completely whiffed on frying up some eggs. How can it be a “Full” breakfast without eggs? Second, and extremely disappointing to me personally, I forgot to put a banger on my plate as well–though truth be told, this amount of food is more than I can comfortably eat in a single meal these days.

The biggest, most heartbreaking mistake of all though was leaving the sausages, etc., on the table for Mindy to make herself a plate when she returned from running an errand. By the time she got back, our dog Inky had–in a very rare display of defiance–gotten onto the table and eaten every piece of meat–every slice of bacon, of sausage, every banger, every bit of black and white pudding, and even some of the tattie scones.

I had uncooked Lorne sausage left over, though, so I went ahead and baked some Scottish morning rolls based on this recipe. The rolls are very much like large dinner rolls, browned just enough to be crusty on top but soft inside, resilient but not stiff.

These morning rolls are used for breakfast sandwiches other than the Lorne sausage roll, or “slice and roll,” of course. The most common is probably the bacon roll, featuring a couple layers of bacon–usually back bacon, but streaky side bacon or belly bacon like we have in the US is fairly common as well, along with ketchup or brown sauce. An egg is not required, though I don’t believe anyone would be mad at you for adding one.

The dog may have eaten all the cooked bacon–but I hadn’t cooked all the bacon. And this roll is great for a breakfast sandwich, crusty but squishy, resilient but not too firm, and it toasts up nicely in a pan. Bacon and brown sauce are a magical combination, and this roll is the perfect vehicle for them.

I was less thrilled with the result when I used Lorne sausage. But again, I believe that is the fault of the recipe I used rather than the collective Scottish palate.

And I don’t want to give the impression that I didn’t like it. What’s not to like? It’s well-seasoned sausage after all–coriander and mace or nutmeg are the basic spices behind a lot of the world’s great sausages, like bratwurst and boudin, frankfurters and boerewors, and Goetta, which is sort of a German-derived sausage somewhat similar to Lorne sausage that’s popular in the Cincinnati area. The bread crumbs help hold moisture in and keep the sausage from being too terribly dry, help it crisp up nicely in the pan while staying relatively soft on the inside.

It makes a fine breakfast, tucked into a morning roll with a fried egg on top, HP sauce lashed liberally over the top, the malty/tangy brown sauce mingling with the savory egg yolk and adding some of the fat that the sausage could have used more of. I’ll almost certainly make Lorne sausage again–but I’ll change up the recipe.