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Caper Sauce for Fish
Stir three dessert-spoonfuls of chopped capers and one dessert-spoonful of vinegar into half a pint of melted butter; put it on a gentle fire, and when the sauce is simmering stir in a dessert-spoonful either of essence of anchovy, mushroom, or walnut ketchup, and season rather highly with cayenne. Time, two minutes to simmer. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for two pounds of fish.
A short Victorian compound sauce built on the standard English base, with one term that trips up almost everyone who reads it.
- "Melted butter" is not melted butterIn nineteenth-century English cookery this means the basic white flour-and-butter sauce — commonly something like 1 oz butter and a little flour cooked out smooth with half a pint of liquid (water, milk, or fish cooking liquor), though proportions vary between books. Plain melted butter with vinegar stirred in will not hold together as a sauce. The base was so standard that recipes like this one simply assume you know it.
- Dessert-spoonfulBetween a teaspoon and a tablespoon, about 2 teaspoons. So roughly 2 tablespoons chopped capers and 2 teaspoons each of vinegar and the chosen essence.
- Half a pintAn imperial half pint, 10 fl oz or about 1¼ US cups. Using a US half pint gives a noticeably thicker, saltier sauce.
- Essence of anchovyA thin, salty anchovy syrup once sold in bottles. Anchovy paste thinned with a little water is the closest substitute; use less than the recipe states and taste, since modern pastes are more concentrated. Worcestershire sauce works but pushes the flavour elsewhere.
- Walnut and mushroom ketchupBoth are dark, thin, salty condiments made by salting and steeping walnuts or mushrooms, not tomato ketchup. Both are still produced in Britain, mushroom ketchup being the more widely stocked. Either brings the salt-and-umami note the sauce depends on.
- Capers and saltCapers in brine should be drained and, if very salty, rinsed. Salt-packed capers must be soaked. The anchovy or ketchup already carries a good deal of salt, so season at the end rather than the start.
- The two minutes mattersSimmering is only to warm the capers through and marry the vinegar. Longer cooking dulls the capers and can break a flour-thickened butter sauce; keep the heat gentle and stir.
- YieldAbout 1¼ cups, which the recipe says is enough for 2 lb of fish; the same sauce was served with poached or boiled white fish, salmon, and boiled mutton.
Caper sauce is one of the many variations Victorian cookery built on what English books called "melted butter" — a flour-thickened butter sauce that served as the base for parsley, egg, shrimp, lobster and caper sauces alike. The capers themselves are the pickled flower buds of Capparis spinosa, a Mediterranean shrub, and had long been imported into Britain; their sharp, salty bite was a standard accompaniment to plain boiled fish and to boiled mutton, a pairing still remembered in British kitchens. The bottled essences and ketchups called for here — anchovy, mushroom, walnut — were the grocery-shelf savoury seasonings of the period, dark salty liquids that did work now often done by a splash of fish sauce or Worcestershire. The listed cost of 8d, quoted as a matter of course, is a reminder that this was a book written for households keeping accounts.