Scottish Lorne Sausage

There are many, many wonderful foods from Scotland, famed around the world: venison, salmon, shellfish.

But let's look at the food which actually gets eaten there:- deep-fried pizza, macaroni cheese pies, potted haugh.[1]

The key to understanding Scottish food is found in the film "So I Married an Axe Murderer" [2] where the character Charlie announces "I think that most Scottish food started out as a dare."

So what is the ideal hearty Scottish breakfast? "Roll and sassige". Cheap, convenient and easy to eat on the go.

[1] Deep-fried Mars bars are not a traditional Scottish comestible. They were invented as a joke in the 1980s. On the other hand, I was in my twenties before I ate a pizza which had not been deep-fried.

[2] Tagline:- "probably the funniest Scottish-American serial-killer romantic comedy you will see this year."

Equipment:-

Blender

Mincer

Loaf tin (used for baking bread and cakes)

Ingredients

500g (1lb) corned silverside (salted beef)

500g (1lb) pork

1.5 cups breadcrumbs

2 TABLESPOONS of ground black pepper

1 teaspoon of salt (more if the beef was not salted)

1 teaspoon of ground corriander

1 teaspoon of ground nutmeg

Cut two or three thick slices of bread, the staler the better.

Stand them upright to ensure the greatest surface area is exposed. In the photograph, you can see how I used some wooden skewers to keep them stable.

Heat them in the lowest possible oven (50C, 100F) for an hour until they are dry and crispy, (but not toasted, because the temperature isn't high enough).

Break the dried bread into small pieces and blitz in a blender or food processor until the pieces are reduced to breadcrumbs. They should not be reduced to a dust, but rather kept reasonably coarse.

Measure out:-

Two TABLESPOONS of ground black pepper

One teaspoon of salt[1]

One teaspoon of ground corriander

One teaspoon of ground nutmeg.

One and a half cups of the breadcrumbs

Mix the dry ingredients together until they are a uniformly distributed.

If you are going to use ordinary beef (or beef mince) for the sausage, rather than corned silverside/salted beef, then add a TABLESPOON of salt rather than a teaspoon. I apologise for repeatedly stressing the "table" bit, but otherwise it would be too easy for anyone to say "a tablespoon is far too much, he must mean a teaspoon." You do seriously need that much pepper and salt to get the authentic taste. Please see the introduction for the guiding paradigms of Scottish vernacular cooking, and note that the word "subtle" is not there.

The key to this step, is to use a medium grating on the mincer, and to pass the meat through it twice.

Select meat which has a fair amount of fat, as that helps with the cooking and the taste.

Cut the meat into chunks which will fit down the mincer's feed tube. I'd bought a couple of pork chops, so they ended up in quite small pieces after I had trimmed them from the bone.

Run the meat through the mincer, alternating pieces of beef and pork.

Pile the minced meat on the input tray on top of the mincer, and pick up the bowl of dried ingredients.

Run the minced meat through the mincer again, adding a spoonful of breadcrumb and spice mixture to each bit which goes into the machine.

The threads which emerge from this process bear a worrying similarity to rat intestines. This is entirely normal to be expected.

Once this second pass is complete, pack the meat into a loaf tin, making sure that there are no voids at the bottom. If you just add the solid lump then it is quite hard to pack properly into the bottom corners, so you can add the meat to the tin one handful at a time.

When the meat is in the tray and packed down hard, cover the tray with cling film (Glad wrap, Saran wrap) and refrigerate for at least an hour.

Bring the chilled loaf tin out of the fridge and tip it out onto a cutting board.

The slices should be about a third of an inch thick (say about 8mm). Getting them all the same thickness is more important than the precise value, as thicker slices obviously take longer to cook.

To store the slices, you can freeze them or refrigerate them as you feel like. If you intend to freeze them then a layer of baking parchment or a couple of layers of tin foil between each slice might save you a trip to A&E (casualty, the ER). See if you can guess how I know.

To cook the sausage, shallow fry it for a couple of minutes each side until it looks like the finished product above.

For the absolutely authentic experience, serve in a soft roll smeared with margarine. If you are feeling posh, then a dollop (1.5 squidges) of HP Sauce is the perfect accompaniment.

Since the language of cooking is apparently french, it is now time to say "Et voila! Bon appetit!"