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Caper Sauce

A sauce made from capers, vinegar, butter or gravy, optionally flavored with herbs or citrus.

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 parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,550 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Caper Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine 1 tablespoon of capers and 2 teaspoons of vinegar in a bowl.

  2. Mince one-third of the capers very fine and halve the rest.

  3. Add the minced and halved capers to ¼ pint of melted butter or thickened gravy.

  4. Stir the mixture gently to combine, avoiding separation.

  5. Optionally, add minced parsley, chevrel, or tarragon, and/or the juice of ½ Seville orange or lemon for extra flavor.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsley + orangetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together680 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Capers + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,637 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Vinegar + parsleytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,477 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Capers
Provide a sharp, briny flavor that cuts through the richness of the butter.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and sharpens the caper flavor.
Butter
Provides fat and a smooth, rich body for the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir the mixture gently to combine, avoiding separation.. Butter-based sauces are emulsions of fat and water-based liquid. Vigorous or overheated stirring can cause the fat to separate, leaving the sauce greasy and grainy.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (capers, vinegar, butter, orange):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Thymefits about as well
  4. Dillfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against capers, vinegar, butter, orange. 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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