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Sauce

Caper Sauce

A sauce made from beef or veal gravy thickened with butter and flour, seasoned with pepper, salt, lemon juice, and capers, served over mutton.

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

Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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

Make the sauce

  1. Thicken the beef or veal gravy with a little butter and flour.

  2. Season with pepper, coarse sea salt, and the juice of a lemon.

  3. Chop the capers and add them to the sauce.

  4. Bring the sauce to a boil, skimming off any foam.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the 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. Pepper + lemontop 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. Flour + caperstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,024 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Beef + muttontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,373 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the gravy into a smooth, coating sauce as it cooks with the butter.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the flour thicken the gravy smoothly.
Capers
Add a sharp, salty bite that cuts through the richness of the gravy.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances its richness.

The step that matters

Bring the sauce to a boil, skimming off any foam. Flour needs to reach a boil to fully thicken the sauce, but a hard boil can scorch or break it. Skimming removes foam and impurities so the sauce stays clean and smooth.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Avocadofits less well
  4. Cherryfits less well

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