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Sauce

Caper Sauce

A buttery sauce made with flour, water, salt, pepper, butter, and capers, served over mutton.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Caper Sauce

Why it works: Flour and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,024 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Caper Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the roux

  1. In a stew pan, melt 2 tablespoons of butter over medium heat.

  2. Add 2 tablespoons of flour and stir until smooth.

Make the sauce

  1. Remove the pan from heat and gradually add ½ pint of water, stirring continuously.

  2. Return to heat and bring the sauce to a boil.

  3. Stir in ¼ teaspoon of salt, ⅛ teaspoon of pepper, and 1 tablespoon of butter; boil for 1 minute.

Finish and serve

  1. Moisten the mutton thoroughly with the sauce.

  2. Add 1½ tablespoons of capers to the remaining sauce and serve.

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.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pepper + caperstop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,088 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Butter + caperstop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,637 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 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

Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat, giving it a smooth, rich mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter, forming a roux that gives body.
Capers
Add a sharp, briny acidity that cuts through the richness of the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the water off the heat. Flour lumps form if liquid is poured into a hot roux too quickly. Removing the pan from heat and adding the water gradually while stirring keeps the starch dispersed so the sauce thickens smoothly.

Swap the capers

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Turmericfits about as well
  3. Nutmegfits about as well
  4. Capersthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, pepper. 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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