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Capers Butter

A butter flavored with spinach or watercress and capers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Spinach and capers share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 99 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Capers Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Boil spinach or watercress for 5 minutes, then drain and press out excess water.

  2. Chop the leaves and squeeze through muslin to collect the green liquid.

Make the butter

  1. Pound 2 teaspoons of capers with ½ ounce of butter.

  2. Gradually mix the spinach liquid into the butter until you achieve a pale green colour.

  3. Incorporate the pounded capers into the butter mixture.

  4. Chill the butter in the ice box or over crushed ice until firm.

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.

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. Spinach + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together99 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + caperstop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,637 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + spinachtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,583 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh butter
Forms the fatty base that gives the sauce its richness and firm, spreadable body.
Spinach or watercress leaves
Supplies the green colour and the leafy liquid that is worked into the butter.
Capers
Add a sharp, briny acidity that cuts through the richness of the butter.

The step that matters

Gradually mix the spinach liquid into the butter. Butter is a fat that holds water only as tiny droplets. Adding the green liquid slowly lets it disperse evenly, so the butter stays smooth and pale green instead of splitting or turning patchy.

Swap the spinach

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, capers):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, capers. 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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