Cumberland sauce is a fruit sauce, usually used on non-white meats, such as venison, ham, and lamb. Coming out of the long-standing medieval tradition of piquant spicy fruit sauces rendered sharply sour with verjuice or vinegar and served with meat, but created sometime in the 19th century,[1] the sauce appears in various editions of Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management. The sauce was invented in Germany, according to Alexis Soyer's recipe in The Gastronomic Regenerator (1846) for a port-wine based sauce accompanying boar’s head, which Janet Clarkson notes "contains what we think of as the required citrus note in the form of Seville orange rind (along with mustard)."[2] It is a more complex version of a simple redcurrant sauce.
Despite its German origin, today the sauce is ubiquitous in the Cumbria region of England and is thought of as a thoroughly British condiment.
Although variations exist, common ingredients include red currantsorcowberries, portorclaret, dry mustard, pepper, orange, ginger, red currant jelly and vinegar.
