Cumberland sauce

A sharp sauce for cold meat

Cumberland sauce is a pourable British condiment made from redcurrant jelly, mustard, pepper, salt, blanched strips of orange peel and port. It is sweet, sharp and pungent at once, and it is served cold. Elizabeth David called it the best of all sauces for cold meat, and it is the usual accompaniment to ham, pressed beef, tongue, venison, pork brawn and game.

The sauce belongs to an older family of sharp fruit sauces. Medieval cooks made sharp sauces with verjuice or vinegar, and the Oxford English Dictionary describes Cumberland sauce as a piquant sauce served especially with cold meat. What sets Cumberland sauce apart is that it is built from a preserved fruit product. The jelly is already a set, sugared fruit preserve, and the sauce turns it back into a liquid by mixing it with port and mustard. The preservation question therefore belongs to the finished mixture, not to the jelly alone.

Origins and the name

The date and place of origin are disputed. Most accounts place the full form of the sauce in the 19th century. Janet Clarkson identified an American citation from 1856 and earlier, similar sauces. William Kitchiner's The Cook's Oracle, first published in 1817, includes a wine sauce for venison or hare made from claret or port and redcurrant jelly. That recipe is an ancestor of the sauce, not a named Cumberland sauce.

The first dated mention of a sauce Cumberland in the sources read is in The Times of 10 September 1872, which reported that boar's head had been served with it at a Berlin banquet attended by Wilhelm I, Franz Joseph and Alexander II. The Oxford English Dictionary's earliest citation is from 1878. Two newspapers in Cumberland ran advertisements in December 1859 for a bottled Cumberland sauce, but did not give its ingredients.

The name is uncertain. One theory links it to Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, a Hanoverian prince. Another links it to the county of Cumberland, now part of Cumbria. Some accounts propose a German origin, linked to Hanover, but this rests on attribution and circumstantial evidence rather than firm documentation.

Soyer's method and the modern recipe

Alexis Soyer's recipe of 1853 is the one Elizabeth David identified as without doubt Cumberland sauce. Soyer presented it as the German method for serving boar's head. He cut the rind of two Seville oranges, free of pith, into strips about half an inch long, blanched them in boiling water and drained them into a basin. He then added a spoonful of mixed English mustard, four spoonfuls of currant jelly, a little pepper and salt, mixed well, and finished with half a pint of good port.

The method is short, and its logic is simple. The jelly supplies sweetness, body and the fruit flavour. The mustard and pepper give heat, the port gives wine depth, and the blanched orange strips add a bitter citrus edge and a texture for the eye. Soyer's version has no cooking step after the blanching, and the sources read do not say the mixture must rest. Amounts differ from book to book, and the port in particular is one of the quantities most often changed between recipes. The amounts above are Soyer's, and the sources do not give a better standard.

Variants and related sauces

Recipes on Soyer's lines appear in cookbooks from many countries, including the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Ireland, Spain, Sweden and the United States. Some keep the classic form, and others change one element. A Polish version leaves out the mustard and wine, adds horseradish and fries the orange zest before mixing. A New Zealand version adds grated beetroot.

Michel Roux described the sauce as his favourite for terrines, pates and game, and said that it adds a new dimension to a shop-bought pork pie. Auguste Escoffier popularised it in Ma cuisine in 1934, recommending it especially for cold venison. The first printed recipe under the name Cumberland sauce that David found is in a French book on English food from 1904.