The Scots are an ingeniously creative nation. Just about everything that’s useful was invented by a Scot (or the Swabians). Take sausages for example. Whilst most of the world make sausages…well sausage shaped, the Scots don’t.
If you think about it, a long cylindrical piece of meat just isn’t suited to being stuck between two flat slices of bread. It has a tendency to slip out unless you cut it in two and flatten it out. But why go to all that work when there are Lorne sausages in the world. Lorne or, more commonly, square sliced sausages are flat sausages made up of a mix of beef, pork, breadcrumbs and various spices.
They are sausage Nirvana and, apart from being artery-hardening delicious, they fit perfectly between two slices of bread with no danger of slipping out.
I was completely addicted to them as a child which is why I experienced a little thrill of excitement when I saw the above sign in a butcher shop window in Ullapool in the Scottish Highlands. I’d found the equivalent of the sausage world’s Holy Grail…but it was Sunday and the damn shop was shut.
So close and yet so far.
Ugh! I was cursing you for making my mouth water – and I do NOT jest! Then I read the penultimate line and I didn’t feel so bad. I think your pain must have been far worse than mine!
I can vouch for what you say. I used to have a friend in Perth, who made her own sausages (having been taught by an ex-husband, who was a butcher), and they were the finest, most delicious sausages ever.
I used to have three of them on rolls nearly every lunchtime when I was a spotty teenager (cause and effect). Funnily, I’ve just found a recipe – experimentation is definitely on the agenda 🙂
A thoroughly ingenious piece of scots forward thinking, this square sausage; but I have to observe that the sandwich, as we know it, was invented by an Englishman. Useful invention is not confined to Scota and Swabians!
No indeed not. Would the square slice sausage exist without a similar shaped piece of bread? A world without square sausages just doesn’t bear thinking about.