Hip to be square

“Go to Glasgow at least once in your life and have a roll and square sliced sausage and a cup of tea. When you feel the tea coursing over your spice-singed tongue, you’ll know what I mean when I say: It’s good to be alive.”

– Billy Connolly

Every time I went home my mother asked me the same question…

“Have you tried the square sausage from the butcher’s yet?”

“No,” I regularly confirmed. “I have not.”

“I’ll have to buy you some, then.”

A child of Caledonia, my mother was more than a little enthusiastic when she discovered that a local butcher’s was doing this delicacy from her home-land.

“It’s better than the stuff we used to get at hame (home),” she qualified.

This is obviously good news all round, seeing as how Glasgow isn’t just around the corner.

Also known as ‘Lorne sausage’ or simply, ‘slice’, square sausage is practically an institution in Scotland and is as common on cooked breakfasts there as bacon is here.

Traditionally made from a mixture of minced beef (and/or pork), breadcrumbs, and spices, although termed a sausage, no traditional casing is used to hold the meat in shape, so it is usually served as square slices from a formed block.

Think meat loaf meets sausage meets square burger.

True to her word, my mother bought a healthy portion of square sausage from the butcher’s and then saved me an unhealthy portion, which she stuck into the freezer for another day.

After delivering said portion, it then went into my freezer for an unspecified spell in purgatory. Then we all reverted back to type.

“Have you tried the square sausage I got you yet?”

“No,” I regularly confirmed. “I have not.”

“Am I gonnae have tae cook it fer ye then?”

No such thing was necessary, of course, and on a recent Saturday afternoon I remembered about the sausage in the freezer.

This was duly retrieved and set onto a window sill to thaw and I went about trying to work up an appetite via a football match on TV and several cold beverages. It didn’t take long to arrive, either (90 minutes plus stoppage time plus a trip to the toilet, to be exact). and then I dug out the frying pan for some real action.

There’s nothing to cooking square sausage really. They are generally fried in the same way that you’d fry a burger or sausage. I started the process with a few drips of oil but I soon realised that the square sausage has plenty of its own fat as the bottom of the frying pan started to become yet more lubricated.

Also, given the goodly crust which had developed on the surface of the sausage, I took these signs to mean that they were nicely cooked through.

I ate my square sausage two ways. On this Saturday evening in question, the first went down Billy Connolly style, on a roll with a cup of tea.

“Don’t ferget tae add some broon (brown) sauce,” my mother reminded me. And I didn’t.

The second instalment was the following morning with some tatty scones (potato bread) fried in the square sausage’s superfluous fat and a perfectly poached egg. Nae broon sauce that time, though.

Honestly, I’m not quite sure which method I preferred for my square sausage consumption; they were both equally delicious, although I’m not sure the broon sauce brought much to the table for round one.

I suppose that means I’ll have to give both versions another whirl one of these weekends and then decide.

Isnae it gid tae be alive!