Caper Sauce
Stir in melted butter two large tablespoonfuls capers, a little vinegar. Nasturtiums pickled, or cucumbers cut very fine will be good substitutes for the capers. For boiled mutton.--Mrs. R.
Caper Sauce.
To one cup drawn butter add three tablespoonfuls green pickled capers. If prepared for boiled mutton, use half teacupful of the water in which it was boiled; add salt and cayenne pepper. Let it boil up once and serve.-Mrs. S. T.
Two versions of the same sauce, from two contributors: one a plain melted-butter dressing, the other built on drawn butter and mutton broth. Both take under ten minutes.
- Drawn butter is not melted butterIn nineteenth-century American usage drawn butter is a thickened sauce: roughly 2 tablespoons butter cooked with 1 tablespoon flour, then whisked with about a cup of hot water and simmered until smooth. Mrs. S. T.'s cup of drawn butter is that sauce, not a cup of clarified fat.
- Half a teacupfulPeriod teacups were smaller than a modern mug and are variously reckoned at about 4 to 6 fl oz, so half a teacupful is somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 cup of the mutton cooking water. Add it gradually — the sauce should coat a spoon, not run off it.
- Capers and their brine"Green pickled capers" are ordinary brined capers. Drain them, and treat the brine as the vinegar Mrs. R. calls for: a teaspoon or two is enough to sharpen melted butter without splitting it. Salt-packed capers should be rinsed and soaked first, and the sauce then needs its own vinegar.
- Boil up once, and no moreThis is the hinge in the second version. A flour-thickened butter sauce needs one brief return to the boil to set the starch, but sustained boiling after the mutton water goes in will break the emulsion and leave an oily film. Take it off the heat as soon as it bubbles.
- Nasturtium budsNasturtiums -- Pickled nasturtium seed pods were a common kitchen-garden caper substitute and are used in much the same way; the recipe says only "nasturtiums pickled." Finely chopped cornichons or gherkins are the modern equivalent of the "cucumbers cut very fine."
- Mutton, and what to use insteadBoiled mutton is rare in shops now; a boned leg or shoulder of lamb, gently simmered, gives the same fatty, gamey base that the acid in this sauce is there to cut. Keep a ladle of the cooking liquid back before you carve.
- YieldNeither version says. The drawn-butter version comes to roughly 1 1/2 cups by its own quantities; the melted-butter version makes rather less and is best mixed to order.
Caper sauce with boiled mutton was one of the fixed pairings of British and Anglo-American cookery. The logic is straightforward: boiled mutton is rich and mildly flavoured, and the salt-and-vinegar sting of pickled flower buds answers it. Capers are the unopened buds of Capparis spinosa, a Mediterranean shrub, and they had to be imported and bought, hence the garden substitutes. Pickled nasturtium pods were grown for precisely this purpose in American kitchen gardens through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) prints two versions side by side, signed only with initials, is characteristic of the book: Marion Cabell Tyree assembled it from the contributions of some 250 Virginia housekeepers, and duplication was left standing rather than edited away.