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Caper Sauce

A savory sauce made with butter, flour, water, capers, egg yolk, lemon juice, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Caper Sauce

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Caper Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the flour and mix well.

  3. Stir in the pepper, salt, and boiling water.

  4. Cook on the heat until the sauce thickens.

Finish the sauce

  1. Remove from heat and stir in the capers.

  2. In a separate bowl, beat the egg yolk with the lemon juice, then stir into the sauce.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Capers + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,222 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Flour + caperstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,024 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pepper + caperstop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,088 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and rich flavour as it melts into the base.
Flour
Thickens the sauce by absorbing liquid as it cooks with the butter.
Egg yolk
Adds richness and body, and thickens the sauce gently when stirred in.
French capers
Provide the sharp, briny acidity that gives the sauce its characteristic flavour.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the richness of the butter and yolk.

The step that matters

Stir the egg yolk into the sauce. Egg yolk can curdle or scramble if added to very hot liquid. Beat it with the lemon juice first and stir it in gradually, off the heat or over low heat, so the sauce stays smooth and creamy.

Swap the capers

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, pepper, egg, lemon):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Nutmegfits about as well
  4. Capersthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, pepper, egg, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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