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Sauce

An Excellent Substitute for Caper Sauce

A sauce made from parsley, butter, salt, and vinegar, used as a substitute for capers.

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

Prepare the parsley

  1. Boil the parsley slowly until it changes color.

  2. Cut the parsley, but do not chop it finely.

Make the sauce

  1. Add the parsley to melted butter.

  2. Stir in salt and vinegar.

  3. Bring to a boil and serve.

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
Provides the herbal flavor and most of the sauce's body.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, coating mouthfeel.
Vinegar
Adds acidity, giving the sharp tang that capers would normally provide.

The step that matters

Boiling the parsley slowly until it changes color. Prolonged heat breaks down the green chlorophyll pigment and dulls the herb's fresh flavor. Stopping once the color changes helps keep the sauce bright green and tasting of parsley rather than drab and cooked.

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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