Name: Caper Sauce
Ingredients: strong beef or veal gravy; 2 tablespoons butter; 2 tablespoons flour; pepper; coarse sea salt; juice of 1 lemon; 1 large tablespoon capers

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

Thicken the beef or veal gravy with butter and flour.
Season the gravy with pepper, coarse sea salt, and lemon juice.
Chop the capers and add them to the sauce.
Bring the sauce to a boil, skim it, and pour it 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.

Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Lemon + caperstop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,222 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Flour + caperstop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,024 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18,971 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 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

Butter: Enriches the gravy and, with flour, helps thicken it into a smooth sauce.
Flour: Thickens the gravy so the sauce coats the meat instead of running off.
Capers: Add a sharp, briny bite that cuts through the richness of the gravy.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances its savoury depth.

Swap the lemon

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

Lemonthe original
Avocadofits about as well
Limefits less well
Raisinfits less well

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