Cumberland sauce is a savoury sauce of English origin, made with redcurrant jelly, mustard, pepper and salt, blanched orange peel, and port wine. The food writer Elizabeth David described it as "the best of all sauces for cold meat".[1] It is thought to be of 19th-century origin. Among the conjectural reasons for its name are honouring a Duke of Cumberland or alternatively reflecting the county of its origin.
Piquant spicy fruit sauces rendered sharply sour with verjuice or vinegar featured prominently in medieval cuisine.[2] Cumberland sauce, thought to have originated in the 19th century, is in that tradition. The Oxford English Dictionary describes it as "a piquant sauce served esp. with cold meat".[3] The dictionary's earliest citation for a sauce of that name is 1878, but it is mentioned in The Times six years earlier, reporting a banquet in Berlin in September 1872, attended by the Emperors Wilhelm I, Franz Joseph and Alexander II, at which hure de sanglier (boar's head) was served with "sauce Cumberland".[4] In 2009 a food historian, Janet Clarkson, identified an American citation from 1856, as well as details of some sauces from earlier in the 19th century that bore similarities to what became known as Cumberland sauce:[5] she instanced William Kitchiner's, The Cook's Oracle, first published in 1817, which includes an unnamed "Wine sauce for Venison or Hare" in which claret or port are mixed with redcurrant jelly.[6]
Cut the rind, free from pith, of two Seville oranges into very thin strips half an inch (1cm) in length, which blanch in boiling water, drain them upon a sieve and put them into a basin, with a spoonful of mixed English mustard, four of currant jelly, a little pepper, salt (mix well together) and half a pint (300ml) of good port wine.[1]
Advertisement in a Cumberland paper, 1859
Soyer described his recipe as "the German method of making a sauce to be eaten with boar's head",[7] and David followed up the German connection with mention of the popular belief that the sauce was named for the Hanoverian prince Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland.[1] She added that a simple connection with the county of Cumberland (now part of Cumbria) was also a possibility. Two Cumberland newspapers of the 1850s repeatedly carried advertisements for a bottled Cumberland sauce, although no hint was given of the ingredients.[8] After commenting that the supposed Hanoverian origin was "as good as any and better than some", David added that it was odd that Cumberland sauce is not mentioned in any 19th-century cookery book, including those by Eliza Acton, Mrs Beeton and Charles Elmé Francatelli. The first printed recipe for a specifically named Cumberland sauce identified by David was in a French book about English food, published in 1904. She found further French associations: Henry Babinski described a similar sauce in his Gastronomie pratique (1907),[1] and Auguste Escoffier popularised it and printed his recipe in the "Sauces anglaises froides" section of his Ma cuisine (1934), particularly commending the sauce as an accompaniment to cold venison.[9]
In David's view it is "the best of all sauces for cold meat – ham, pressed beef, tongue, venison, boar's head or pork brawn".[1] More recently Michel Roux, Sr. wrote of Cumberland sauce that it was his favourite sauce for terrines, pâtés and game. "We often serve it at The Waterside Inn and I never tire of it. It adds an entirely new dimension to a pork pie bought from the delicatessen".[10]
A Polish variant omits mustard and wine, adds horseradish, and fries the orange zest before adding it to the mixture.[11] A New Zealand version adds grated beetroot.[12] Recipes for more or less the generic version on Soyer's lines appear in cookery books from, among other countries, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Ireland, Spain, Sweden and the US.[13]
Espagnole sauce is a basic brown sauce, and is one of the mother sauces of classic French cooking. In the early 19th century the chef Antonin Carême included it in his list of the basic sauces of French cooking. In the early 20th century Auguste Escoffier named it as one of the five sauces at the core of France's cuisine.
French cuisine is the cooking traditions and practices from France. In the 14th century, Guillaume Tirel, a court chef known as "Taillevent", wrote Le Viandier, one of the earliest recipe collections of medieval France. In the 17th century, chefs François Pierre La Varenne and Marie-Antoine Carême spearheaded movements that shifted French cooking away from its foreign influences and developed France's own indigenous style.
Tomato sauce can refer to many different sauces made primarily from tomatoes, usually to be served as part of a dish, rather than as a condiment. Tomato sauces are common for meat and vegetables, but they are perhaps best known as bases for sauces for Mexican salsas and Italian pasta dishes. Tomatoes have a rich flavor, high water content, soft flesh which breaks down easily, and the right composition to thicken into a sauce when stewed without the need for thickeners such as roux or masa. All of these qualities make them ideal for simple and appealing sauces.
Mayonnaise, colloquially referred to as "mayo", is a thick, cold, and creamy sauce commonly used on sandwiches, hamburgers, composed salads, and French fries. It also forms the base for various other sauces, such as tartar sauce, fry sauce, remoulade, salsa golf, ranch dressing, and rouille.
In cooking, a sauce is a liquid, cream, or semi-solid food, served on or used in preparing other foods. Most sauces are not normally consumed by themselves; they add flavor, moisture, and visual appeal to a dish. Sauce is a French word taken from the Latin salsa, meaning salted. Possibly the oldest recorded European sauce is garum, the fish sauce used by the Ancient Romans, while doubanjiang, the Chinese soy bean paste is mentioned in Rites of Zhou in the 3rd century BC.
Nabemono, or simply nabe, is a variety of Japanese hot pot dishes, also known as one pot dishes and "things in a pot".
A Sunday roast or roast dinner is a traditional meal of British origin. Although it can be consumed throughout the week, it is traditionally consumed on Sunday. It consists of roasted meat, roasted potatoes and accompaniments such as Yorkshire pudding, stuffing, gravy, and condiments such as apple sauce, mint sauce, or redcurrant sauce. A wide range of vegetables can be served as part of a roast dinner, such as broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, parsnips, or peas, which can be boiled, steamed, or roasted alongside the meat and potatoes.
Hollandaise sauce, meaning Dutch sauce in French, is a mixture of egg yolk, melted butter, and lemon juice. It is usually seasoned with salt, and either white pepper or cayenne pepper.
Blanquette de veau is a French veal stew. In the classic version of the dish the meat is simmered in a white stock and served in a sauce velouté enriched with cream and egg. It is among the most popular meat dishes in France.
Sauce Robert is a brown mustard sauce and one of the small sauces, or compound sauces, derived from the classic French demi-glace, which in turn is derived from espagnole sauce, one of the five mother sauces in French cuisine.
Beef stroganoff or beef stroganov is a Russian dish of sautéed pieces of beef in a sauce of mustard and smetana. From its origins in mid-19th-century Russia, it has become popular around the world, with considerable variation from the original recipe. Mushrooms are common in many variants.
Rémoulade is a cold sauce. Although similar to tartar sauce, it is often more yellowish, sometimes flavored with curry, and often contains chopped pickles or piccalilli. It can also contain horseradish, paprika, anchovies, capers and a host of other items.
A velouté sauce is a savory sauce that is made from a roux and a light stock. It is one of the "mother sauces" of French cuisine listed by chef Auguste Escoffier in the early twentieth century, along with espagnole, tomato, béchamel, and mayonnaise or hollandaise. Velouté is French for 'velvety'.
Peach Melba is a dessert of peaches and raspberry sauce with vanilla ice cream. It was invented in 1892 or 1893 by the French chef Auguste Escoffier at the Savoy Hotel, London, to honour the Australian soprano Nellie Melba.
Mustard is a condiment made from the seeds of a mustard plant.
Redcurrant sauce, also known as redcurrant jelly, is an English condiment, consisting of redcurrants, sugar and rosemary. Some other recipes include additional ingredients such as red wine, white wine, port, mustard, lemon or orange zest, and very occasionally shallots. The sauce is traditionally eaten as part of a Sunday roast, particularly with roast lamb, roast goose or roast turkey and is an integral part of Christmas dinner in Britain.
Chaudfroid sauce, also spelled as chaud-froid sauce, is a culinary sauce that can be prepared using a reduction of boiled meat carcasses and other ingredients. Simpler preparations of the sauce omit the use of meat, and some use sauces such as espagnole, allemande or velouté as a base. Chaudfroid sauce is typically served cold, atop cold meats and cold meat-based dishes such as galantine and terrine.
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