Name: Caper Sauce
Ingredients: ½ pint drawn butter; 2 tablespoons capers, chopped; 1 tablespoon caper juice

Why it works: Butter and capers are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,637 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Caper Sauce

Ingredients

½ pint drawn butter
2 tablespoons capers, chopped
1 tablespoon caper juice

Directions

Prepare

Chop the capers finely, unless they are very small.
Prepare ½ pint of drawn butter.

Make the sauce

Add the chopped capers and caper juice to the butter.
Let the mixture simmer gently.
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.

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.

Butter + caperstop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,637 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Drawn butter: Forms the rich, smooth base that carries the sauce's flavour and body.
Capers: Add a sharp, briny acidity that cuts through the richness of the butter.
Caper juice: Adds concentrated caper flavour and acidity to the sauce.

“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.