Home › The World's Kitchen › Cumberland Sauce
Cumberland Sauce
Place four tablespoons currant jelly in a saucepan, place on fire until melted, then pour in one gill demi-glace, half gill tomato sauce and a tablespoon port wine. Boil two ounces well-picked currants for two minutes, drain and add to sauce. Scald in boiling water for two minutes one ounce almonds, drain, peel, cut in thin strips lengthwise, and add to sauce. Boil for ten minutes, carefully mixing once in a while, then use as required.
A cooked, brown-sauce version of Cumberland sauce, closer to a restaurant garnish sauce than the cold, uncooked jelly-and-zest relish most cooks know by that name. The measurements are small and the whole thing comes together in under twenty minutes.
- A gill is half a cupA gill is 4 fl oz in US measure (half a cup), so one gill demi-glace is 4 fl oz and the half gill of tomato sauce 2 fl oz; in British imperial measure a gill is 5 fl oz. With the melted jelly you finish with roughly a cup of sauce, enough for four to six servings alongside ham, venison or game birds.
- Demi-glaceA reduced brown sauce built on veal stock, and the backbone of the recipe. Good jarred or frozen demi-glace works; a thin unreduced stock will leave the sauce watery and the ten-minute boil will not save it.
- Tomato sauce means the classical oneNot pasta sauce. In a professional kitchen of the period this is a smooth, lightly thickened tomato sauce made with stock and mirepoix. Passata simmered briefly with a little butter is the nearest quick substitute.
- Which currants"Well-picked" points to dried Zante currants, sorted for stems and grit. The two-minute boil is there to plump them. Fresh red currants would collapse in the same time and give a much sharper sauce.
- The almondsWhole raw almonds, scalded two minutes so the skins slip off, then slivered lengthwise. Bought blanched slivered almonds save the step.
- Currant jellyRed currant jelly, not grape or blackcurrant. Four tablespoons is about 3 oz; melt it gently, since jelly scorches quickly on direct heat before it liquefies.
- The final boilTen minutes of boiling, stirring occasionally, reduces the sauce and gives it gloss. If it tightens too far, loosen with a spoonful of stock rather than water.
- ServingMeant to go out hot with roast or braised meat.
Cumberland sauce is generally traced to the English table of the nineteenth century and named, by tradition rather than by any documented christening, for a Duke of Cumberland; some accounts credit German court kitchens with the original. The familiar version is cold and uncooked: red currant jelly loosened with port, sharpened with mustard, and finished with blanched shreds of orange and lemon peel, served with ham, tongue and cold game. What appears here is a professional kitchen's reworking of it into the brown-sauce idiom, with demi-glace and tomato sauce doing the work of body and the almonds standing in for the citrus julienne. That shift tells you where the book sits: in the era when Escoffier's system of mother sauces and their derivatives had become the common grammar of hotel cooking, and older national dishes were routinely rewritten to fit it.