Cumberland sauce

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". 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. 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". 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 was served with "sauce Cumberland". 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: 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. Elizabeth David found a recipe from 1853 by Alexis Soyer for what she says "is without doubt Cumberland sauce":

Source: Wikipedia