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Dory or Caper Sauce
Blend two ounces of butter with one table-spoonful of flour, and stir it into a saucepan containing the third part of a pint of boiling water, add equal quantities of shrimps and capers pounded, about two dessert-spoonfuls of each, and boil for some minutes; then remove the saucepan from the fire, and stir in till dissolved an ounce more of butter, and two tea-spoonfuls of whole capers. Serve in a tureen.
A short white sauce built on the old English pairing of capers with a flour-and-butter thickening, meant here for John Dory. The measurements translate cleanly once the imperial pint is accounted for.
- The third part of a pintAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so a third is about 6 2/3 fl oz — roughly 3/4 cup or 190 ml. That gives a sauce thin enough to pour but thick enough to coat.
- Blended butter, not a rouxTwo ounces of butter kneaded with a tablespoon of flour is a beurre manié: the flour is coated in fat so it disperses in the boiling water without lumping. Add it in small pieces and whisk, rather than dropping it in whole.
- The hinge: the last ounce of butter goes in off the heatThe final ounce is there for gloss and body, and it must be stirred in after the pan leaves the flame. If the sauce boils again the emulsion breaks and the butter floats out as oil.
- Boil for some minutesA few minutes at a bare simmer is enough to cook the raw taste out of the flour; if it reduces past pouring consistency, keep a little extra hot water to hand.
- ShrimpsThe book most likely means small brown or pink shrimp, cooked and peeled, pounded to a paste in a mortar. Two dessertspoonfuls is roughly four teaspoons; small cooked cold-water shrimp pulsed briefly in a processor, or a spoonful of potted shrimp with its butter, both work.
- CapersUse capers packed in brine or vinegar, drained. Two dessertspoonfuls are pounded with the shrimp to flavour the body of the sauce, and two teaspoons are left whole and added at the end so there is still something to bite on.
- Season lastCapers, brine and shrimp are all salty, so no salt is called for until the sauce is finished and tasted. A squeeze of lemon or a teaspoon of the caper vinegar sharpens it if it tastes flat.
- Yield and serviceSomething under a cupful, enough for a few portions of fish. A warmed tureen or small jug keeps it from cooling and stiffening at the table.
The John Dory — Zeus faber, the flat, ugly, dark-spotted fish much admired by Victorian cookery writers for its flavour — was often served plain boiled, which left the whole burden of the dish on its sauce. Capers, the pickled flower buds of Capparis spinosa, were a standard English larder import, and caper sauce was the fixed accompaniment to boiled mutton as well as to boiled fish; the addition of pounded shrimp here is the trick that turns a general-purpose caper sauce into a fish sauce, the same logic that gives us shrimp butter and lobster sauce. Cassell's treated the small repertoire of flour-thickened white sauces as foundation work, variations on one method to be learned once and then pointed at whatever came in from the fishmonger.