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Sauce

Caper Sauce for a Boiled Jigot of Mutton

A sauce made with beef or veal gravy, butter, flour, pepper, salt, lemon juice, and capers, served over boiled mutton.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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 for a Boiled Jigot of Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a saucepan, combine the beef or veal gravy with butter and flour to thicken.

  2. Season with pepper, salt, and lemon juice.

  3. Chop the capers and add them to the sauce.

  4. Bring the sauce to a boil, skim off any foam, and pour it over the boiled 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.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + caperstop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,222 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Flour + caperstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,024 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. 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

Beef or veal gravy
Provides the savoury meaty base that the sauce is built on.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth, body-rich sauce when heated.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich gravy and butter.
Capers
Contribute briny, sharp acidity that cuts through the richness of the mutton.

The step that matters

Adding the flour to the butter and gravy. Flour must be cooked and fully dispersed in the fat and liquid to thicken smoothly; added unevenly or not heated enough, it leaves lumps or a raw, pasty taste. Bringing the sauce to a boil then fully thickens the starch.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Avocadofits about as well
  3. Limefits less well
  4. 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.

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