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Sauce

Caper Sauce to Serve with Fish

A buttery sauce with capers, wine, and parsley, finished with an egg yolk and sweet cream, served over fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,550 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Caper Sauce to Serve with Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce base

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Add the flour and cook for 4 minutes, stirring constantly.

  3. Pour in the White Moselle wine and warm water, then season with salt and pepper.

  4. Add the parsley and simmer for 20 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. In a bowl, mix the egg yolk with the sweet cream and capers.

  2. When ready to serve, pour the hot sauce over the egg mixture.

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. Parsley + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  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

Butter
Forms the fat base that the flour cooks into, adding richness to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter and liquid.
Egg yolk
Enriches the sauce and adds body when combined with the hot sauce.
Sweet cream
Adds richness and smoothness to the egg yolk mixture.
Capers
Add a sharp, briny acidity that cuts through the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Pour the hot sauce over the egg mixture. Pouring hot sauce onto the egg yolk mixture gradually warms the yolk, which helps it blend smoothly. Adding it all at once or to a very hot sauce can scramble the egg, so the sauce turns grainy.

Swap the capers

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

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Thymefits about as well
  4. Capersthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, wine, pepper, parsley, egg, cream. 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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