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Caper Butter
Chop one table-spoon of capers very fine, rub through a sieve with a wooden spoon, and mix them with a salt-spoon of salt, quarter of a salt-spoon of pepper, and one ounce of cold butter. Put a layer of this butter on a dish, and serve fish on it.
A compound butter of the plainest sort: two tablespoons of butter, a spoonful of capers, salt and pepper. It works because it is laid cold under hot fish and melts into a sauce on the plate.
- The measurementsA salt-spoon is roughly 1/4 teaspoon, so the pepper is a pinch. One ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons. The whole quantity dresses one or two fillets; scale up by the ounce.
- Cold butter, and cold it staysThe butter must be cold and firm when the fish goes on top, or it slumps into grease rather than emulsifying with the fish juices. Mash the capers into butter that is cool but workable, then chill the finished butter until firm before plating.
- Capers then and nowCapers of this period were commonly sold pickled in vinegar, and vinegar strength varied from jar to jar. Salt-packed capers need a 10-minute soak and a rinse or they will overwhelm the 1/4 teaspoon of added salt. Taste before you salt at all.
- Skip the sieveRubbing capers through a sieve with a wooden spoon was one way to get a smooth paste. A few passes of a knife on a board, or a mortar, does the same in less time; the point is that no whole caper should remain to sit as a lump under the fish.
- Warm the dish, not the butterServe on a platter that is warm to the hand but not hot. A hot plate melts the butter before the fish arrives and it separates.
- No acid is added, deliberatelyNo acid is added -- The recipe calls for nothing beyond capers, salt, pepper and butter; whatever sharpness there is comes from the pickled capers themselves. If your capers are the mild sort, a few drops of lemon in the butter will restore some of that sharpness.
- KeepingRolled in parchment, the butter holds a week refrigerated and several months frozen. Slice coins off the log as needed rather than making a fresh ounce each time.
Compound butters -- butter worked with a chopped seasoning, chilled, and served under or over hot food -- were the workhorse sauces of the later nineteenth-century kitchen, standing in for a made sauce when there was no time or no stock. Buckeye Cookery (issued in Minneapolis in 1877 as Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, itself a reworking of an earlier Ohio compilation) files this one among the catsups and sauces. Capers are the pickled flower buds of Capparis spinosa, a Mediterranean shrub, and in an American household of this period they were an imported jarred good rather than anything grown at home. The pairing with fish is older than the book and is generally traced to European practice, where the sharpness of the pickled bud was thought to answer the richness of the fish; the same logic produced the more elaborate caper sauces of French and English cookery, of which this is the frugal domestic cousin.