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Sauce

Dory or Caper Sauce

A buttery sauce flavored with shrimps and capers, suitable for fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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 ↓

Dory or Caper Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Blend the butter with the flour.

  2. Stir the mixture into a saucepan with boiling water.

  3. Add the pounded shrimps and capers, and boil for a few minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove from heat and stir in the additional butter until dissolved.

  2. Add the whole capers and serve in a tureen.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + shrimptop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,931 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Shrimp + caperstop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together179 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 with fat and gives it a smooth, rich mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the butter and water into a smooth, cohesive sauce.
Capers
Add a sharp, acidic, briny flavour that cuts through the richness of the butter.
Shrimps
Add savoury, briny seafood flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour and butter into boiling water. Adding the flour mixture to boiling water while stirring helps prevent lumps, because the starch disperses evenly and gelatinises as it heats. Stirring constantly keeps the sauce smooth and consistent.

Swap the capers

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

  1. Capersthe original
  2. Jalapenofits about as well
  3. Garlicfits less well
  4. Nutmegfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, shrimp. 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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