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Sauce

An Excellent Substitute for Caper Sauce

A sauce made from boiled parsley or pickled French beans, melted butter, vinegar, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 28,563 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

An Excellent Substitute for Caper Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Boil the parsley or pickled French beans slowly until they turn a lead color, but do not chop them very fine.

  2. Add the boiled mixture to the melted butter.

  3. Stir in the vinegar and salt, then bring to a boil.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately.

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.

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. Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + vinegartop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,477 recipes

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

  3. Butter + vinegartop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,513 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

What each ingredient does

Parsley or pickled french beans
Provide the main caper-like flavor and texture of the sauce.
Melted butter
Forms the rich fat base that carries the sauce and adds smoothness.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the richness of the butter.

The step that matters

Boil the parsley or pickled French beans slowly. Slow boiling softens the herbs or beans gently, so they keep a tender texture and flavor without turning mushy or bitter. Chopping them too fine would make them break down into the butter unevenly.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Garlicfits about as well
  3. Parsleythe original
  4. Capersfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, vinegar. 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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