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Mock Caper Sauce

A sauce made with sage, pepper, salt, breadcrumbs, and gravy, served with roasted pork.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Sage and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,388 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Mock Caper Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pork

  1. Parboil the leg of pork, then remove the skin.

Roast and season

  1. Roast the pork, basting it with butter.

  2. Mix the sage, black pepper, salt, and bread crumbs in a bowl.

  3. Add the minced onion if desired.

  4. Sprinkle the mixture over the pork when it is almost done roasting.

Serve

  1. Pour the made gravy into the serving dish.

  2. Place the stuffing under the knuckle skin or garnish with fried or boiled balls of stuffing.

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. Sage + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Pork + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,214 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Pork + sagetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,527 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Pork leg
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender and juicy during roasting.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and bind with the sage to form a dry, savoury stuffing crust.
Butter
Adds fat that helps the pork brown and keeps the surface from drying out.
Dried sage
Adds a savoury, herbal aroma that flavours the stuffing.
Gravy
Adds moisture and savoury flavour to the finished dish.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, butter, sage, pepper, bread):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Tomatofits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, butter, sage, pepper, bread. 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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