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Sauce

Caper Sauced

A buttery caper sauce made with butter, flour, water, lemon juice, and capers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,222 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Caper Sauced

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cream 2 ounces of butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add 1.5 ounces of flour and ½ pint of water, stirring over the heat until it boils.

  3. Gradually work in 2 ounces of butter, seasoning to taste.

  4. Add the juice of ½ lemon and finally stir in 2 tablespoons of capers.

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. Lemon + caperstop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,222 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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 and adds richness and a smooth, glossy texture.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth sauce as it heats and boils.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the sauce.
Capers
Add a salty, sharp flavour to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour and water until it boils. Flour must be stirred continuously while the liquid heats so starch can gelatinise evenly. Stopping or letting lumps form leaves a lumpy sauce that is hard to smooth out later.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Limefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, 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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