Skip to main content
Sauce

Brown Caper Sauce

A brown sauce made with veal or beef gravy, capers, pickle liquor or chili vinegar, cayenne, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Capers and vinegar 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 ↓

Brown Caper Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Thicken the veal or beef gravy as directed for Sauce Tournée.

  2. Add the capers and pickle liquor or chili vinegar to the gravy.

  3. Season with cayenne and coarse sea salt to taste.

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. Capers + vinegartop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,453 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Veal + caperstop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together198 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  3. Veal + vinegartop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together948 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

Veal or beef gravy
Forms the savoury body of the sauce, carrying the other flavours.
Capers
Add sharp, briny flavour that cuts through the richness of the gravy.
Pickle liquor or chili vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances its savoury depth.

Swap the capers

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, vinegar):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Pepperfits about as well
  4. Capersthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, 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.

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes