Skip to main content
Sauce

Canape Sauce

A creamy sauce made from hard‑boiled eggs, butter, anchovies, capers, vinegar or lemon juice, mustard, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Capers and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 624 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Canape Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Rub the yolks of the hard-boiled eggs until fine.

  2. Add butter and stir until creamy.

  3. Mash the anchovy fillets and add to the mixture.

  4. Stir in capers, tarragon vinegar or lemon juice, and mustard.

  5. Blanch the parsley in boiling water, chop it fine, and add to the sauce.

Use

  1. Use as directed in following recipes.

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 + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together624 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Capers + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together379 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Tarragon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Tarragon + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together901 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Capers + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Hard-boiled yolks are rubbed fine to form the body of the sauce.
Butter
Stirred in to make the sauce creamy and rich.
Anchovy fillets
Mashed into the sauce to add a salty, savoury depth.
Capers
Add a sharp, briny bite that cuts through the richness.
Tarragon vinegar or lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the fat.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, butter, anchovy, capers, tarragon, parsley):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Lettucefits about as well
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter, anchovy, capers, tarragon, parsley. 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

Mixed MustardMixed Mustard9 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes