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Sauce

Mock Caper Sauce

A sauce made with melted butter, pickled vegetables, and lemon juice or vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and peas are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,005 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Mock Caper Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Cut the pickled vegetables into bits the size of capers.

  3. Add the cut vegetables to the melted butter.

  4. Stir in the lemon juice or vinegar.

  5. Serve as a sauce.

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. Lemon + peastop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,005 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Butter + peastop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,887 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

Melted butter
Forms the rich base that carries the flavour of the sauce.
Lemon juice or vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the butter and sharpens the pickled flavour.
Pickled green peas, french beans, gherkins, or nasturtiums
Supplies tangy, briny bits that stand in for capers in the sauce.

Swap the peas

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Chickpeafits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, lemon. 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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