Name: Caper Sauce
Ingredients: ⅓ cup vinegar; 4 teaspoons capers; coarse sea salt to taste

Why it works: Vinegar and capers are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,453 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Caper Sauce

Ingredients

⅓ cup vinegar
4 teaspoons capers
coarse sea salt to taste

Directions

Make the sauce

Stir the vinegar into a bowl.
Add the capers and bring to a boil.
Season with coarse sea salt as soon as it boils.

Store and vary

Store the sauce after adding the capers; you can mince some of them for a finer texture.
For variation, substitute a little chopped pickled nasturtiums for some of the capers.

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.

Vinegar + caperstop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,453 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Vinegar: Provides the sharp acidity that gives the sauce its tang.
Capers: Supply briny, sharp flavour; mincing releases more of it for a finer texture.

“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.