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Caper Sauce
To a pint of drawn butter, add three table-spoons of capers. Serve with boiled or roast mutton. Another method is the following: Fifteen minutes before the mutton is done, melt two table spoons butter in a sauce-pan, stir into it one table-spoon flour; when thoroughly mixed add half a pint of the liquor in which the mut ton is boiling, and half a pint of milk, season with pepper and salt, cook a few minutes (to swell the grains of the flour), and just before serving (in order that their color may not be lost by standing) add two heaped table-spoons capers.
Two versions of the same sauce: one built on a pint of ready-made drawn butter, one built from scratch on the mutton's own cooking liquor. The second is the better sauce and the one worth making.
- "Drawn butter" is not melted butterIn American books of this period drawn butter means a thin butter sauce — roughly 2 tablespoons butter and 1 tablespoon flour cooked together, then thinned with about a cup of hot water or stock. Simply melting a pint of butter and adding capers gives you an oil slick, not a sauce.
- QuantitiesA pint is 2 cups; half a pint is 1 cup. The second method makes about 2 cups of sauce, enough for six to eight servings — generous for one leg of mutton, and it halves cleanly.
- The hinge: add the capers at the very endThe instruction about colour is the point of the recipe. Capers held in a hot sauce turn drab olive and their vinegar sharpness cooks off. Stir them in off the heat, immediately before the sauce goes to the table.
- Cooking the flour"To swell the grains of the flour" means simmering the roux-thickened liquid three to five minutes so it loses its raw pastiness. Do not rush this; the sauce thickens fully only once it has actually simmered.
- If you are roasting rather than boilingThe recipe assumes boiled mutton and borrows its liquor. For a roast, use lamb or mutton stock, or the strained pan juices with the fat skimmed, in the same proportion against the milk.
- Capers and muttonNonpareils in brine are the standard; rinse salt-packed capers and drain them well or the sauce goes briny. Lamb stands in for mutton without adjustment, though it needs the caper sharpness rather less.
- Seasoning orderSalt after the mutton liquor goes in, not before. Boiling liquor from a salted joint can be salty enough on its own, and the capers add more.
Capers are the pickled flower buds of Capparis spinosa, a scrubby Mediterranean shrub, and their pairing with mutton is a long-standing British convention — sharp brine cutting the fat and pronounced flavour of an older sheep. American cookbooks inherited the pairing wholesale, which is why a plainspoken Ohio compilation like Buckeye Cookery (1877) includes it without feeling any need to explain what it is for. The second method here reflects thrifty nineteenth-century practice: the sauce is thickened with the very liquor the joint is boiling in, so the cooking water is put to use rather than thrown away. Where imported capers were dear or unobtainable, households of the period sometimes pickled nasturtium seed pods as a substitute, a swap noted in a number of books of the era.