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Caper Sauce
1/3 cup butter 3 tablespoons Gold Medal flour 1/2 cup capers 1 1/2 cups mutton broth 1/2 teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne Melt butter, add flour mixed with seasonings; cook smooth, add broth (one-third at a time). Cook together, stirring constantly. When done, add the capers well drained from their liquor.
A plain velouté-style sauce: a blond roux slackened with stock and finished with capers. The only real technique note is at the end, where the capers go in off the boil.
- Add the capers last, and coldAdd the capers last -- They are stirred in after the sauce is cooked so they stay whole and keep their sharpness. Long simmering dulls the flavour and turns them soft.
- Mutton brothMutton is scarce in most markets now; a well-reduced lamb stock is the nearest thing, and a light chicken or veal stock works if you want the sauce milder. The sauce was built on mutton broth because it was traditionally served with boiled mutton.
- Ratio and consistency3 tablespoons flour and 1/3 cup butter to 1 1/2 cups liquid gives a fairly thick pouring sauce. Cut the roux to 2 tablespoons each of butter and flour if you want something that runs rather than coats.
- Adding the broth in thirdsGradual addition is a common instruction in cookbooks of this period, and it works: each addition should be fully smooth and thickened before the next goes in. Warm broth incorporates faster than cold.
- Cook the roux out"Cook smooth" means working the butter and flour together until no lumps remain; a short cooking before the liquid goes in loses the raw-flour taste, and the roux should not be allowed to colour.
- SaltHalf a teaspoon assumes an unsalted homemade broth. With commercial stock, and with a half cup of brined capers going in, salt at the end rather than the beginning.
- CapersHalf a cup is generous by modern standards. Drain them well as directed, and rinse if they are the salt-packed sort rather than brined.
- YieldRoughly two cups of finished sauce once the capers are in; enough to sauce a dish of boiled meat or fish for several people.
Caper sauce is one of the small family of English butter-and-flour sauces that survived the nineteenth century largely unchanged, and it is bound up with boiled mutton — the pairing is close to proverbial in Victorian and Edwardian cookery, which is why the sauce here is built on mutton broth. Capers themselves are the pickled flower buds of Capparis spinosa, a Mediterranean shrub; they reached English and American kitchens as an imported bottled good and were valued precisely because their acidity cut through fat. The recipe's presence in a flour company's cookbook is no accident: books like this one were promotional, and a roux-thickened sauce is a quiet argument for keeping a sack of the brand in the pantry. The instruction to add liquid "one-third at a time" reflects the gradual-addition advice widespread in American domestic teaching in this period.