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Caper Sauce

A creamy sauce made with flour, butter, milk, water, capers, pepper, salt, and optional cream.

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

Why it works: Flour and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,024 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Caper Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a pan and mix in the flour over gentle heat.

  2. Gradually add the milk and water, stirring carefully.

  3. Stir the sauce in one direction until it boils and thickens.

  4. Allow the sauce to boil for 2 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the chopped capers, pepper, and salt.

  2. Serve immediately, as the sauce must not boil or stand after adding the capers or it will curdle.

  3. If desired, stir in 1 tablespoon of cream just before serving.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Capers + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,088 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Thickens the melted butter and milk into a smooth, thickened sauce.
Butter
Forms the fat base that the flour cooks into before the liquid is added.
Milk
Provides the liquid that the flour thickens into a creamy sauce.
Capers
Add a sharp, salty flavour that cuts through the richness of the sauce.

The step that matters

Do not boil the sauce after adding the capers. Once the capers are in, prolonged boiling or standing can cause the sauce to curdle, so it should be served immediately without further boiling.

Swap the capers

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Capersthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, milk, pepper, cream. 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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