Lorne sausage — square sausage, or just “slice” in Scotland — is a sausage with no casing at all. The seasoned meat is pressed into a rectangular tin, chilled until firm, and cut into flat squares about a centimetre thick that go straight onto a griddle. It is the heart of a Scottish breakfast roll and of the full Scottish breakfast, and its diagnostic, apart from the shape, is the meat: it leans on beef, usually with some pork, where almost every English breakfast sausage is pork. It exists for a practical reason anyone who has cooked links will recognise — a flat slice cooks fast and evenly and fits a square roll exactly. The best-known story about the name, that it honours the Glasgow comedian Tommy Lorne, is wrong: butchers were advertising “Lorne Sausages” in Scottish newspapers by 1892, when Tommy Lorne was a toddler. A home version needs no casing, no stuffer and no special gear beyond a loaf tin, which makes it an easy first sausage. I have not made this one yet; the formula is built from Marianski’s Lorne sausage and is untested.
Ingredients
MEAT BLOCK (2,270 g / 5 lb), % of meat weight
- 1294 g (2 lb 14 oz) beef chuck, about 20% fat — 57%
- 976 g (2 lb 2 oz) pork belly, skinless — 43%
BINDER (% of meat weight)
- 477 g dry rusk or plain dried white breadcrumbs (21%)
- 477 g ice water (21%)
SEASONING (% of meat weight)
- 48 g fine salt (2.1%)
- 6.8 g white pepper (or half black, half white) (0.3%)
- 6.8 g ground coriander (0.3%)
- 1.6 g nutmeg (0.07%)
- 2 loaf tins, 9 x 5 in (23 x 13 cm), lined with plastic wrap or parchment
Directions
Key ingredients
- In the collection: beef and Black Pepper. In the collection, the same idea — seasoned meat set in a tin and sliced for frying — shows up in Scrapple (Pennsylvania Dutch) and Goetta (Cincinnati Pork and Oats), though both are cooked first and bound with grain.
- Soak the rusk: combine rusk and ice water and let it stand 10 minutes. The rusk is what keeps a slice juicy and stops it shrinking into a hard patty.
- Grind twice: chill the meat hard, grind through a 10 mm (3/8”) plate, then mix in the seasonings and soaked rusk and grind again through an 8 mm (5/16”) or 6 mm plate. Marianski grinds twice because square sausage should be finer than a Cumberland — it has to hold together as a thin slice with nothing round it.
- Mix well: mix 3–4 minutes, longer than for a link sausage, until the mass is very sticky and stringy. With no casing, the protein bind is the only thing holding the slice together. Under-mixed slices crumble in the pan; that is the main failure.
- Taste: fry a teaspoon. It should be peppery and savoury with a faint warmth from the coriander.
- Press: pack the mixture into the lined tins, pressing hard into the corners to drive out air pockets, which become holes in every slice. Fold the wrap over and chill overnight, or freeze for 1–2 hours, until firm enough to slice cleanly.
- Slice: turn the block out and cut into slices about 1 cm (3/8 in) thick. Slices freeze well between sheets of parchment.
- Cook: griddle or fry in a dry or lightly oiled heavy pan over medium heat, 4–5 minutes a side, to 71 °C / 160 °F. They shrink a little and brown well.
- Serve: in a soft white roll (a morning roll or bap) with brown sauce, or with eggs and a tattie scone.
Notes
Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t. Marianski’s Lorne sausage is the backbone: 400 g beef, 300 g pork belly, 150 g rusk and 150 ml water per kilogram, with 15 g salt, 2 g pepper, 0.5 g nutmeg and 2 g coriander, ground through 10 mm then 8 mm. Re-based on meat weight here: (1) meat 57% beef / 43% belly, as his 400/300; (2) rusk and water at 21% each of meat; (3) salt raised slightly to 2.1% of meat because his 15 g is per kilogram of the whole mix. He also gives a cased version — “when stuffed into casings … Lorne; when pressed in a baking form … Lorne square” — which this recipe does not make. Untested.
Where Lorne sausage came from. It is a Scottish butcher’s product of the late nineteenth century. The earliest firm dates come from newspaper advertising: “Lorne Sausages, 6d” in butchers’ adverts in the Arbroath Herald in 1896, and an advert from Grant’s Store in Renton in the Lennox Herald of 18 June 1892. Square sausage is now standard on every Scottish breakfast menu and in roll shops.
The name. The popular story says it was named after the Glasgow music-hall comedian Tommy Lorne, who supposedly joked about it. The dates kill it: Lorne was born in 1890, the adverts predate his fame by decades, and “Lorne” was his stage name (his real name was Hugh Corcoran). The likelier source for both is the district of Lorn (Lorne) in Argyll, but no document ties the sausage to it either; that remains unproven.
Variations. All-beef square sausage is common; some butchers use more pork. Some add a little rusk colour or paprika for a pinker slice. A peppered version and a version with herbs exist in Scottish butchers’ shops.
Sourcing and gear. A loaf tin is enough; Scottish butchers use a long rectangular mould. Rusk is sold by sausage suppliers; dried breadcrumbs from white bread work.
Still open. No pre-1890 printed recipe has been located, and how the sausage was originally sold — cased, square, or both — before the square form took over is not documented.
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