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Sauce

Caper Sauce

A warm sauce made from butter and flour, flavoured with French capers, egg yolk and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Caper Sauce

Why it works: Capers and lemon 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 Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Heat the butter in a saucepan without browning it.

  2. Stir in the flour until smooth.

  3. Gradually add the milk and season with salt.

  4. Add the capers, then beat in the egg yolk and lemon juice.

Serve

  1. Serve warm.

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. Capers + lemontop 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. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  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
Provides fat and richness, carrying flavor through the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce by binding with the melted butter into a smooth base.
Capers
Add briny, sharp flavor that cuts through the richness of the butter.
Egg yolk
Enriches the sauce and thickens it as its proteins set with gentle heat.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances its richness.

The step that matters

Beat in the egg yolk and lemon juice. Egg yolk proteins set at around 65 to 70°C, so if the sauce is too hot the yolk can scramble and curdle. Beating it in steadily keeps the sauce smooth and thick.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Avocadofits about as well
  4. Vanillafits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, capers, egg. 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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