It’s Just a Roll… Right?
Naw. Absolutely fucking naw.
If you’ve never had a proper Scottish morning roll, you might look at one and wonder what all the fuss is about. It’s bread. Round bread. How exciting can that possibly be?
But anyone who’s walked into a Scottish café, bakery or roll shop first thing in the morning and ordered a roll and slice knows exactly where I’m going with this.
A good morning roll is something else. Slightly crisp and chewy on the outside, soft and airy in the middle, usually covered with a dusting of flour and somehow capable of holding an absolutely unreasonable amount of breakfast without completely falling apart.
Most of the time, anyway.
Get a bad one and the thing disintegrates the second brown sauce touches it. But get a proper fresh morning roll, still soft and slightly chewy, load it with hot square sausage and brown sauce and you’re sorted.
Wash it doon with a can of Bru!
That’s breakfast.
And considering I mentioned morning rolls in my article about Scottish scran, I thought they deserved an article of their own.
Because calling them “just a bread roll” doesn’t quite do them justice.
Morning Rolls Have Always Just Been There
That’s probably the funny thing about writing an article about morning rolls. Growing up in Scotland, you don’t really think of them as being particularly Scottish.
They’re just… there.
You see them piled up in bakeries. Cafés are firing sausage into them all morning. Somebody at work appears with a bag full of rolls and suddenly everyone wants to know where theirs is.
You don’t stop and think, what an interesting example of Scottish food culture.
You think, fuck sake, I should’ve got one.
That’s the sort of food I find more interesting to write about. Not necessarily the famous stuff people associate with Scotland, but the ordinary things we barely even notice because we’ve grown up with them.
And morning rolls are definitely one of those.
My Kind of Morning Roll
For me, morning rolls remind me of work mornings when I used to work at IBM. I’d run down to the local shop, get ma rolls, then jump on the bus to work.
I’d normally get three rolls - one for that morning and the other two for lunch.
It wasn’t some big Scottish tradition anybody announced. Nobody was standing there explaining the cultural importance of the morning roll.
It was just breakfast.
My rolls for work were usually just rolls with cold meat or ham. The big stuff like a roll and slice, or a roll and bacon, was usually something I’d get if I came across a wee van outside a workplace selling hot food.
That’s probably why I still associate them with proper everyday Scottish food. They’re not something I discovered later or tried because somebody told me they were Scottish.
They’ve just always been around.
Roll and Slice Is Hard to Beat
If I’m talking about morning rolls, I’ve got to start with roll and slice.
Square sausage. Lorne sausage. Whatever you want to call it.
I’ve always known it as slice.
And whoever decided to make sausage square deserves some recognition because the thing actually fits inside the fucking roll.
A link sausage is perfectly good, but you’ve usually got two of them rolling about in there and threatening to launch themselves out the other side with every bite.
Slice just sits there perfectly.
Add brown sauce and you’re done.
I’m firmly on the brown sauce side with this one. Tomato sauce isn’t illegal or anything, but given the choice I’m taking brown every time.
Tattie Scone Makes Everything Better
Then there’s the tattie scone.
Potato inside bread shouldn’t really need explaining to Scottish people, but written down it does sound like we’ve decided there weren’t enough carbohydrates involved already.
And I’m absolutely fine with that.
A tattie scone is good on its own in a buttered roll, but stick one in beside a bit of slice and you’ve immediately improved the situation.
Bacon and tattie scone works.
Sausage and tattie scone works.
Start adding egg, black pudding and everything else and eventually you’ve basically crammed an entire Scottish breakfast into a roll.
At that point you’re less concerned about flavour combinations and more concerned about whether the bottom of the roll is going to survive.
The Roll Matters More Than You’d Think
The filling gets all the attention, but the actual roll can make or break it.
We’ve all had the shite ones.
Too dry and half of it ends up on your lap.
Too soft and the bottom dissolves as soon as grease or sauce gets anywhere near it.
Too crusty and you’re having to wrestle with your breakfast at eight in the morning.
A good morning roll needs that slightly chewy outside while staying properly soft inside. Strong enough to hold everything together but still soft enough to squash around whatever you’ve put in it.
Fresh bakery rolls are hard to beat for that.
I’m not going to pretend I don’t buy supermarket ones because of course I fucking do, but when you get a genuinely fresh morning roll you notice the difference straight away.
It’s Not Fancy Food, and That’s the Point
Nobody is putting a roll and sausage on a tasting menu.
At least I fucking hope they’re not.
It’s cheap, filling, straightforward food. The sort of thing you grab from a bakery or café in the morning and eat without giving it much thought.
And I think that’s exactly why it’s worth writing about.
When people talk about Scottish food, you always hear about haggis, shortbread, whisky and the fucking deep-fried Mars bar.
But there’s another side to Scottish food that’s just the normal stuff people actually eat.
Morning rolls.
Tattie scones.
Square sausage.
A bacon roll covered in brown sauce.
The stuff that doesn’t seem interesting when you’ve grown up around it because it’s completely normal to you.
That’s the Scotland I actually like writing about.
So What’s the Best Morning Roll?
I don’t think there is one.
Everybody has their own order and everybody probably thinks everybody else’s is slightly wrong.
For me, it changes. I go through phases where I like one more than the other. Right now, it’s probably a roll and bacon with egg and tattie scone.
That’s the one I’d pick.
You might be a bacon and tattie scone person. Maybe you’re going full breakfast with sausage, bacon, black pudding and egg. Maybe you put tomato sauce on your slice, in which case I’m sure you’re otherwise a perfectly decent human being.
Whatever goes in it, though, the humble morning roll deserves a bit more credit than it gets.
It’s not fancy. It’s not trying to be.
It’s just one of those wee bits of everyday Scotland that’s been sitting under our noses the whole time.
So aye.
The Scottish morning roll deserved its own article.
Turns out I had quite a lot to say about bread.
