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Sauce

Caper Sauce

A quick sauce of butter, lemon juice, capers, and cayenne pepper served over fish or mutton.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Caper Sauce

Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Caper Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over low heat.

  2. Stir in the lemon juice, capers, and cayenne pepper.

  3. Mix well and serve over stewed or boiled fish or 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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Lemon + caperstop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,222 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Provides the rich fat base that carries the sauce's flavour and gives it a smooth, creamy body.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the buttery sauce and balances its richness.
Capers
Contribute a briny, tangy aroma and sharp bite that stands out against the fat.

The step that matters

Melting the butter over low heat. Butter is an emulsion of fat, water and milk solids. Too much heat can scorch the milk solids or break the emulsion, so the sauce turns greasy or grainy when the lemon juice is stirred in.

Swap the capers

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Sagefits better
  4. Capersthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, lemon, 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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