Cumberland Sauce

Boxing Day. The fridge is full of things wrapped in foil. A ham, half-carved. A game pie that has set overnight into something better than it was yesterday. Cold cuts, a terrine, the remains of the cheese. What you need is not more food. What you need is a sauce sharp enough to wake all of it up.

Cumberland sauce is that sauce. Port, redcurrant jelly, the pared zest of an orange and a lemon, a spoonful of mustard, a pinch of ginger. It comes together in fifteen minutes on the back of the hob while you're doing six other things, and it lasts in a jar for weeks. The colour alone justifies the trouble: a deep, glossy ruby that catches the light like a stained glass window in a country church.

I make it once a year, the morning after Christmas, while the kitchen still smells of yesterday's roast and the radio is on low. The redcurrant jelly comes out of the cupboard from the summer's preserving, or from a good jar bought for the purpose. The port is whatever bottle is open from Christmas Eve. The oranges are the ones piled in the bowl on the dresser, the sort that arrive in December and make the whole room smell of Christmas before you've even peeled one.

I wrote it down in the notebook the first year I made it properly: 'Boxing Day. Ham. Sauce in a jar. Worth the trouble.' It still is. There are few better feelings than carrying a cold plate to the table on a dark afternoon and putting a small bowl of something this red beside it.