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One Orange (Dessertspoonful of mixed)
One dessertspoonful of mixed Mustard.
Two Shalots. Two Lemons. Ground Ginger. Half a gill of Marsala.
Half a gill of Port.
Two tablespoonfuls of Red Currant Jelly.
Two tablespoonfuls of Vinegar.
This is an ingredient list for a fortified-wine and currant-jelly sauce of the Cumberland family, printed without a method — the book assumed a cook who had made one before. The proportions are sound; the technique has to be supplied.
- The missing methodPare the orange zest very thin and shred it, then blanch the shreds a minute to take out the bitterness. Warm the jelly with the wines, vinegar and orange juice until the jelly is fully dissolved, whisk in the mustard off the heat, add the zest, and cool. Boiling hard drives off the wine and dulls the mustard.
- Half a gillA gill is 5 fl oz in British measure, so half a gill is 2 1/2 fl oz — a scant third of a cup — of each wine. The American gill is 4 fl oz, which would give 2 fl oz instead; either reading works here, since the balance is forgiving.
- Mixed mustard"Mixed" means mustard powder already made up into a paste with water, not dry mustard from the tin. A dessertspoonful is about two teaspoons; an equal amount of smooth Dijon is the closest ready substitute.
- The orangeThe title indicates one orange, zest and juice both. The recipe does not say which kind; a bitter (Seville) orange suits the sauce well if you can find one, and with a sweet orange you may want to hold back a little of the jelly or add a squeeze of lemon.
- Marsala and portUse a dry or semi-dry Marsala and a ruby port, not tawny. Cooking Marsala sold with salt added will throw the seasoning off.
- VinegarTwo tablespoonfuls of a wine vinegar, not malt or distilled — the sharpness should sit behind the fruit, not in front of it.
- Yield and servingMakes roughly a cup, enough for six to eight. It is a cold sauce: serve it with cold ham, tongue, raised pies, venison or game birds. It keeps a couple of weeks covered in the refrigerator.
Sauces built on red currant jelly loosened with port and sharpened with mustard and orange belong to the Cumberland–Oxford group that ran through nineteenth-century British service cookery; the Cumberland name is generally traced to the Hanoverian dukes of Cumberland and appears in print only in the later 1800s, well after the sauce itself was being made. What marks this version as an especially rich one is the Marsala alongside the port — a Sicilian fortified wine that the English trade had made cheap and abundant since the late eighteenth century, and which Victorian professional kitchens used freely in sweet-savoury sauces and glazes. The absence of a method is itself informative: books of this kind appear to have been written for cooks in service who would have needed the proportions and the marketing list rather than the instruction, and who may well have taken for granted that such a sauce goes to table cold beside the cold sideboard joints.