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Sauce

Caper Sauce

A butter sauce flavored with capers, boiled and served hot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Caper Sauce

Why it works: Sauce and capers work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 678 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Caper Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Prepare 1 pint of butter sauce.

  2. Bring the sauce to a boil.

  3. Add 1 tablespoon of capers just before serving.

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. Sauce + caperstop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together678 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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 sauce
Forms the creamy base that carries the flavor of the dish.
Capers
Add a briny, acidic bite that cuts through the richness of the butter.

The step that matters

Adding the capers just before serving. Capers are added at the end so they keep their texture and sharp flavor. Prolonged heating softens them and dulls their briny acidity.

“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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