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Caper Sauce

A sauce made with butter, capers, flour, mutton broth, milk, pepper, and sea salt, served with boiled or roasted mutton.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Caper Sauce

Why it works: Capers and flour 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 ↓

Caper Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt 2 tablespoons of butter in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in 1 tablespoon of flour until well mixed.

  3. Add ½ pint of the liquor from the boiling mutton and ½ pint of milk.

  4. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  5. Cook for a few minutes to thicken.

Finish and serve

  1. Combine 1 pint of drawn butter with 3 tablespoons of capers in a bowl.

  2. Add 2 heaped tablespoons of capers just before serving.

  3. Serve with boiled or roast mutton.

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 + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,024 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Capers + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,088 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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

Flour
Thickens the butter and milk into a smooth, cohesive sauce when cooked.
Capers
Add sharp, acidic flavour that cuts through the richness of the butter.
Butter
Provides fat and rich flavour as the base of the sauce.
Milk
Adds body and creaminess to the sauce.

The step that matters

Cook the sauce for a few minutes to thicken. Flour must be cooked long enough in the hot fat and liquid to swell and set the sauce; undercooked flour leaves a raw, pasty taste and a thin texture.

Swap the capers

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

  1. Cardamomfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Capersthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, mutton, milk, pepper. 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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