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Caper Sauce, a Substitute For
Pickled gherkins, pickled nasturtium pods, French beans, or green peas, cut small like capers, may be used as a substitute for them. The nasturtium pods are by many persons considered preferable. When none of these are at hand, parsley may be boiled slowly to take away its greenness, and cut up into pieces, not chopped small. Proceed in the same way as with capers. Time, one or two minutes to simmer. Probable cost, the same as for capers; parsley will be cheaper. Sufficient, a pint of sauce for a leg of mutton.
This is a cross-reference entry rather than a standalone sauce: it assumes you already know how to make caper sauce and only tells you what to put in it when the caper jar is empty. The sauce base is the melted-butter sauce of the period — flour-thickened butter and water or the mutton's cooking liquor — not a modern beurre blanc.
- What "proceed in the same way" meansThe reader is expected to turn to the caper sauce recipe: a melted-butter sauce (flour-thickened butter with water or the mutton's liquor) of about a pint, with the chopped substitute stirred in. The entry gives no quantities, so any proportions here are a reconstruction rather than the book's own.
- Simmer one or two minutes, no moreThe short time is presumably to warm the pickle through rather than cook it; long simmering will dull the colour of gherkin or nasturtium pods, and acid does not sit well in a butter-thickened sauce. The book does not say why.
- Nasturtium podsThe green seed pods of Tropaeolum majus, pickled in vinegar while young and firm. Nasturtiums were a common kitchen-garden plant and the pickled pods were a recognised caper substitute; they are hard to buy today outside specialist producers, so for most cooks the substitution now runs backwards.
- "French beans" and "green peas"French beans here means young green beans, cut into caper-sized pieces; given the company they keep in the list they may be intended pickled as well as cooked. If used plain they add texture rather than sharpness, so a little vinegar or lemon juice in the sauce would compensate.
- Boiling parsley "to take away its greenness"Simmering the leaves to lose the raw, grassy note; the recipe says only "boiled slowly" and gives no time for it (the one to two minutes is the simmering of the sauce). The instruction to cut it in pieces rather than chop it small suggests the aim was pieces that read as capers.
- Cut small like capersCapers are small, so pieces of roughly that size; the book says only "cut small like capers" and "not chopped small" for the parsley.
- YieldA pint of sauce for a leg of mutton, as the recipe states. A whole leg would feed a table of at least six to eight by modern portions, so half the quantity would suit a smaller joint or chops.
Caper sauce with boiled mutton was one of the fixed pairings of the British table, and Cassell's treats it as a given — the interest of this entry is that capers themselves, imported pickled flower buds of Capparis spinosa from the Mediterranean, were an expense a careful household might want to avoid. Hence the pickled nasturtium pod, which appears in English cookery and gardening books from the eighteenth century onward as a homegrown stand-in and which the compiler says "many persons" prefer. The fallback to boiled parsley shows the logic of the entry clearly enough — by that point the cook is not matching the flavour at all, only the look of green flecks in a white sauce.