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Caper Sauce for Boiled Mutton
Take about half a pint of good melted butter and stir into it one table-spoonful and a half of chopped capers and two tea-spoonfuls of vinegar. Stir the sauce over the fire, simmering it very gently for about a minute. Serve in a sauce tureen. Probable cost, 6d. for this quantity. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A one-minute sauce, but it rests entirely on a term that no longer means what it says. Get that right and the rest is assembly.
- "Melted butter" is not melted butterIn Victorian English this is the standard flour-thickened butter sauce: butter cooked with flour and whisked with about half a pint of water or light stock until smooth and the consistency of thin cream. Period proportions vary from book to book, usually with rather more butter than flour. Plain liquid butter will split the moment the vinegar goes in and gives you nothing to carry the capers.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 US cups. That is a generous quantity of sauce for four; scale down if the mutton is a small joint.
- CapersSalt-packed capers should be rinsed and soaked briefly before chopping, or the sauce will be aggressively salty. Brined capers can go straight in, drained. A tablespoon and a half chopped is roughly 15 g whole.
- The vinegarUse the caper brine itself in place of the two teaspoons of plain vinegar for a rounder flavour. Malt or white wine vinegar both work; balsamic does not.
- Simmer briefly and gentlyOne minute is the whole of it. Boiling the sauce hard after the acid goes in dulls the capers and can break a thin roux; keep it just trembling and take it off.
- Season at the endThe recipe gives no seasoning instruction, presumably because the butter sauce would have been seasoned when it was made. Taste after the capers and vinegar are in, since both bring salt and sharpness, and add white pepper rather than black to keep the sauce pale.
- Cost and yieldSixpence was a real but modest sum. It serves three or four alongside boiled mutton, and is equally at home with boiled lamb, poached skate or steamed cauliflower.
Caper sauce with boiled mutton is one of the fixed pairings of the British table, common enough by the nineteenth century that cookery books listed it as a matter of course rather than a suggestion. The logic is straightforward: boiled mutton is fatty and mild, and the pickled flower buds of Capparis spinosa, imported from the Mediterranean and sold in vinegar, cut through it. The dish also shows the Victorian kitchen's reliance on what it called melted butter, a flour-thickened white sauce that served as the base for a whole family of variations - parsley, egg, anchovy, caper - each made by stirring one ingredient into the same foundation. The costing in pence is a standing feature of the book.