Name: Caper Sauce
Ingredients: 1½ cups drawn butter sauce; 1½ cups capers; Chopped parsley (optional); Chopped olives (optional); Chopped cucumber pickles (optional)

Why it works: Capers and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,550 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Caper Sauce

Ingredients

1½ cups drawn butter sauce
1½ cups capers
Chopped parsley (optional)
Chopped olives (optional)
Chopped cucumber pickles (optional)

Directions

Prepare

Prepare drawn butter sauce.
Add capers to the sauce.

Finish and serve

Optionally, stir in chopped parsley, olives, or cucumber pickles.
Serve with boiled mutton or white fish.

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.

Capers + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,550 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Capers + cucumbertop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together303 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Capers + olivetop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,688 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Parsley + olivetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together9,649 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Olive + cucumbertop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,611 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

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

What each ingredient does

Drawn butter sauce: Provides the rich, fatty base that carries the flavour of the sauce.
Capers: Add sharp, briny acidity that cuts through the richness of the butter.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sauce, capers, olive, cucumber):

Tarragonfits about as well
Parsleythe original
Garlicfits about as well
Dillfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sauce, capers, olive, cucumber. 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.