Caper Sauce
-Mrs. Granlees.
To white sauce No. I add three tablespoonfuls of capers and one tablespoonful of their liquor. Served with boiled mutton. For fish add to this, pepper salt and anchovy essence.
A two-line variation on a base sauce, which is how sauce chapters in these books were built: one white sauce, then a dozen additions. The only real work is the béchamel underneath it.
- White sauce No. IThe book is cross-referencing its own basic recipe, which you do not have on this page. A standard Victorian white sauce of this type is 1 oz butter and 1 oz flour cooked together without colouring, then 1 pint of milk (or half milk, half the liquor the mutton was boiled in) whisked in and simmered until it coats a spoon. Season with salt and a little white pepper.
- Capers and their liquorThe recipe gives no quantity for the white sauce itself, so three tablespoons is only generous if you take the base as about a pint. Brined capers in a jar are what is meant; if you use salt-packed capers, rinse them and substitute a tablespoon of the mutton stock plus a squeeze of lemon for the liquor.
- Add the capers off the heatThe recipe does not say when to add them, but stirring them in once the sauce is cooked and pulled from the burner keeps them firm; prolonged boiling softens them and dulls their sharpness. A flour-thickened sauce will take the tablespoon of caper liquor without much trouble, but adding it off the heat does no harm.
- Chop or leave wholeNonpareils can go in whole. Larger capers, and certainly caperberries, should be roughly chopped so the sauce spoons evenly over the meat.
- Anchovy essenceThe fish version calls for bottled anchovy extract, which is still made but far less widely stocked than it was. A teaspoon of anchovy paste, or two or three anchovy fillets mashed to a paste, does the same job; add it a little at a time and taste, as it carries a lot of salt.
- YieldDepends entirely on how much white sauce No. I you make, since the recipe does not say. It will thicken as it stands; loosen it with a spoonful of hot milk or stock rather than reheating hard.
Caper sauce and boiled mutton were closely associated in British cooking well before this book: Hannah Glasse in the eighteenth century, and Eliza Acton and Mrs Beeton in the nineteenth, all treat capers as a standard accompaniment to boiled mutton. The capers themselves are the unopened flower buds of Capparis spinosa, a Mediterranean shrub, pickled in brine or vinegar and shipped north in jars; their function here is corrective, cutting the fat and blandness of long-boiled mutton in the way that mint sauce cuts roast lamb. The recipe is credited to a Mrs Granlees, one of the contributors these turn-of-the-century compilations were built from.