Lorne Sausage: The Square Slice and the Comedian Who Didn't Name It

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

The Tommy Lorne story is popular but has been challenged by researchers who found earlier uses of the name. The question has not been settled. The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) describes the product and the British sausage tradition it belongs to, but offers no view on the name.

The square sausage

established Lorne sausage is made by mixing minced beef, pork or both with rusk or breadcrumbs, water and seasonings such as pepper, coriander and nutmeg, then pressing the mixture into a rectangular tin. The block is chilled and sliced into squares about a centimetre thick. The slices are fried or grilled.

Is it really a sausage?

established The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) answers yes. Its entry on sausages argues that neither meat, nor the tube shape, nor a casing defines a sausage: if a sausage mixture is shaped into a cohesive form, it counts by its shape and composition. To show two kinds of flexibility in one product, it chooses the Lorne sausage, square in section ("squerr" in Glasgow) and without a casing. Its other British skinless examples are the Glamorgan sausage of cheese and leek, held together with egg white, and the extinct Epping sausage of pork, beef suet and bacon with sage.

Cereal and beef

established The Companion explains two features that Lorne sausage shares with most British sausages. The first is cereal. British sausages differ from continental ones in having a significant cereal content, which the Companion dates to the later nineteenth century, when industrial makers seeking a mass market kept costs down. Before that, English sausages were made almost entirely of meat, though the idea of mixing meat and cereal in a casing was old, as haggis shows. Most British sausages are now made with rusk or a special sausage meal rather than the traditional breadcrumbs, and commercial meat content ranges from under half to over 95 per cent. Ice is added to the meat before it goes into the bowl chopper, both to stop it overheating and, in British sausages, to provide water to moisten the cereal.

established The second is beef. Pure beef sausages, the Companion notes, are cheaper and are preferred in Scotland, "where pork has been a less popular meat". The square slice, often all beef or largely beef, fits that pattern, as do Meg Dods's smoked beef sausages below.

shared The Companion also offers a climatic explanation for the British preference for fresh sausages to cook rather than cured ones to slice. Cured sausages need a dry wind, so the tradition was strongest in mountain regions and places with dry northerly winds; damp countries like Britain were at a disadvantage. This is a plausible general argument rather than a documented history.

A Scottish breakfast

established Square sausage is a central part of a Scottish cooked breakfast, alongside bacon, black pudding, tattie scones and eggs. It is also eaten in a soft morning roll, sometimes with egg or brown sauce, as a takeaway breakfast. Its shape fits a square roll neatly.

established The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) observes that few British people now cook a traditional English, Scottish, Irish or Welsh breakfast at home, but that they expect hotels and cafés to offer one, and that the idea of a great British breakfast may have Scottish roots: it cites Samuel Johnson's praise of the Scottish breakfast after his tour of the Hebrides. The square slice is one of the regional items that make a Scottish breakfast distinct from an English one.

Tommy Lorne

traditional Tommy Lorne was a popular Glasgow music hall comedian of the 1920s and 1930s. The story goes that he joked about the sausage, calling it something like a "doormat", and that it became known by his name.

An older name?

shared Some researchers have found newspaper references to "Lorne sausage" from before Tommy Lorne became famous, which, if confirmed, would rule out his being the source. An alternative suggestion links the name to Lorne in Argyll, but no clear evidence supports that either. The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014), which describes the product in some detail, does not mention Tommy Lorne or any other explanation of the name; its silence neither supports nor undermines either story.

Older Scots sausages

established The folklorist F. Marian McNeill, in The Scots Kitchen (1929; second edition 1963), does not mention Lorne or square sausage; it does not appear in the 1963 text at all. That silence proves nothing about its age, since she collected old and regional dishes rather than butchers' everyday lines, but it means her book cannot be cited for the square sausage's history.

established What she does record are older beef sausages that show the Scottish preference for beef over pork. Meg Dods's "smoked Scots sausages" (1826) were salted beef minced with suet, seasoned with pepper, salt and onion, stuffed into an ox gut, plaited into links and hung in the chimney to dry. Meg Dods notes that they were made when the mart, the winter beef animal, was killed, and that they were taken to the hill, the moor or the boat. McNeill also gives "Scots kidney balls" from the Highland Feill Cookery Book: lean steak and suet minced with pepper, allspice, ginger, cloves and saltpetre, rolled into balls and sealed in suet, then fried brown as a breakfast or supper dish. The same mixture, she notes, could be put into ox skins and tied in links.

shared These recipes share with Lorne sausage a skinless or simple form, a beef base and a role at breakfast, but there is no documented line of descent from them to the modern square slice.

established McNeill also records a Glasgow saying that "mince and mashed" was to the Glaswegian what "sausages and mashed" was to the Londoner, a reminder that minced beef, not the pork sausage, was the city's everyday meat.

• Lorne sausage has no skin.
• It is cut from a block into square slices.
• It is also called "a slice".
• Tommy Lorne was a Glasgow comedian.
• The comedian story may not be true.
• Older Scottish sausages were often all beef, smoked in the chimney and taken out to the hill or the boat.
• F. Marian McNeill's classic The Scots Kitchen never mentions square sausage.
• In Glasgow it is "squerr" sausage.
• The Oxford Companion to Food uses Lorne sausage to prove that a sausage needs neither a skin nor a round shape.
• Ice is a standard ingredient in sausage-making, added to keep the meat cool while it is chopped.
• Cereal in British sausages dates from industrial production in the later nineteenth century.

• Disputed: Lorne sausage was named after the comedian Tommy Lorne. It is widely said that he joked about the sausage and gave it his name. Some researchers have found references to "Lorne sausage" from before he became famous, which would rule him out. The question has not been settled.
• Disputed: Lorne sausage was named after the Lorne district of Argyll. It is an alternative suggestion, but no clear evidence supports it either.
• Myth: Lorne sausage descends from older Scottish beef sausages. Meg Dods's smoked beef sausages and McNeill's kidney balls share a beef base and a breakfast role with the square slice, but there is no documented line of descent.