Lorne Sausage

You can keep your Pork and Leek, Venison and Juniper Berry and your Lamb and Mint Sauce. You can also keep your Toulouse, your Cherizo and your Merguez. What am I on about ? Sausages that’s what. Sausages. Now don’t get me wrong – there’s nothing like throwing some Walls Pork or some Cumberlands onto the barbie, but for me the king of all sausages is the good, old fashioned Lorne or Square Sausage. 

There’s probably quite a large percentage of the UK population who have neither seen nor tasted a lorne sausage and it’s their loss, although I suppose it’s probably quite difficult to get them anywhere south of the border. When I bring them over on the plane I invariably get stopped because, as I said in a blog a couple of days ago, it’s a block of meat which shows up on the airport x-ray machine as a sinister blob. A blob they just have to examine more closely and generally ask what it is. If the person doing the search has never seen or heard of a Lorne Sausage, it’s then a long complicated process to explain what it is. It would be much better if they had a frying pan beside the x-ray machine cause you could then cook some, prove it is edible (and not explosive) and they’d be hooked. 

The Lorne Sausage is credited to an 19^th century comedian called Tommy Lorne who apparently loved sausages so much that he used to eat them during his acts and whilst history gives a good account of Tommy Lorne, there is nothing to explain why the Scot’s came up with a square, skinless sausage. Anyway, they are delicious (although probably an acquired taste for someone who has never eaten one) and my kids love them. When I returned from Glasgow late on Monday night and went down to the kids’ bedrooms to say hello and goodnight, the first words Kitty uttered were, ‘have you brought any Scottish sausage home with you’? And this from a  girl who never tells her classmates what she has for breakfast because she's embarrassed (she usually has eggs and bacon or banana pancakes) as most French kids just have a croissant and an orange juice to start the day. 

The one thing which I could not bring home from Glasgow though and something which compliments a Lorne Sausage perfectly is a Plain Loaf, another Scottish delicacy difficult to find in England. Now whether Plain Loaves were designed, developed or whatever with Lorne Sausages in mind, I don’t know, but it’s a strange form of sliced loaf, which when a slice is halved makes a perfect shape for the geometric shape of the Lorne. None of this extra bread round the sides of the sausage, it fits it perfectly. No round, cylindrical sausages jumping out of the bread onto the floor, just a perfect symmetry between bread and meat. 

They say the Scots are the masters of invention – the Lorne Sausage and Plain Loaf proves it beyond doubt. And do you know the best thing of all? I still have another 2 kilos of Lorne Sausage to share with the kids for our breakfasts over the coming weeks.