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Caper Sauce for Mutton
Boil together 1 1/2 cups water, 1 tablespoonful butter, 4 tablespoonfuls capers, and 1 teaspoonful vinegar. In separate saucepan place 1 tablespoonful each of butter and flour, a pinch of salt, and a dash of cayenne. Cook thoroughly, and when boiling stir in a little time from the first saucepan.
A plain white sauce sharpened with capers, built the old way: a butter-and-flour roux in one pan, a hot caper liquid in another, the two combined off the boil. It makes roughly a cup and a half, enough for a leg of mutton or lamb for four to six.
- The hingeAdd the hot caper liquid to the cooked roux gradually, whisking hard between additions. Dumping it in at once gives a lumpy sauce that no amount of later beating will smooth.
- Cook the roux, but do not colour it"Cook thoroughly" here means two to three minutes over moderate heat until the flour smells nutty rather than raw. This sauce should stay pale, so stop before it browns.
- Capers and their brineFour tablespoons of capers is generous by modern taste and will carry plenty of salt. Drain brined capers and hold back the added salt until you taste at the end; salt-packed capers need rinsing and a short soak.
- VinegarOne teaspoon is a corrective, not a flavour. Use white wine vinegar or the caper brine itself rather than harsh distilled vinegar.
- ConsistencyOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to a cup and a half of liquid gives a thin, pourable sauce. For something that clings to sliced meat, use two tablespoons of each.
- CayenneA "dash" is a very small quantity, on the order of an eighth of a teaspoon or less. It is there for warmth behind the capers, not for heat you can identify.
- FinishingSimmer the combined sauce two or three minutes to lose any floury taste, then serve at once; a flour-thickened sauce skins over as it stands.
Caper sauce is one of the fixed English pairings, set beside boiled mutton in the same way mint sauce sits beside roast lamb, and it appears in household manuals throughout the nineteenth century in almost this form: a butter sauce or thin white sauce, sharpened with vinegar, loaded with capers. The capers themselves are the pickled flower buds of Capparis spinosa, a Mediterranean import that reached British and American kitchens by the bottle, which may be why so many recipes of the period call for a spoonful of the vinegar along with the buds. Boiled mutton was everyday meat in a period when sheep were often kept for wool as well as for meat and older carcasses were common; a salty, acidic sauce did real work against a strong, fatty joint.