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Nasturtium Sauce
This is made by stirring into one teacup drawn butter, three tablespoonfuls pickled nasturtiums, adding a little salt and pepper. Simmer gently and serve.--Mrs. S. T.
A three-line caper sauce built on the nineteenth-century American "drawn butter," which is not clarified butter but a thin flour-and-butter sauce. Everything depends on understanding that one term.
- Drawn butterIn American books of this period drawn butter means a light white sauce: roughly a tablespoon of butter cooked with a tablespoon of flour, then a cup of hot water or fish stock whisked in and simmered until smooth, with more butter beaten in off the heat. It is not the clarified butter the phrase usually denotes today. A cup of clarified butter here would give you a bowl of grease with capers in it.
- A teacupNot the 8-ounce measuring cup; period sources vary, but roughly 6 fl oz is a reasonable working figure for the finished sauce.
- Pickled nasturtiumsThe green seed pods of Tropaeolum majus, picked while soft and put up in vinegar and salt. Among other uses they were valued as a homegrown caper. Nonpareil capers in brine, drained, substitute one for one, though they lack the nasturtium's pepperiness.
- Do not let it boilThe hinge. A flour-thickened butter sauce holds together only at a gentle simmer; a hard boil drives out the emulsified butter and leaves a greasy, separated sauce. Bring it barely to a shiver, hold it a minute to warm the pods through, and serve.
- Add the pickle lastThe original stirs the pods in before simmering; if you prefer, add them at the end, since the vinegar in the pods will thin the sauce the longer it sits over heat.
- SaltThe pickle brine carries salt, as does the stock if you use one rather than water. Taste before adding any; the original asks only for "a little."
- Yield and servingAbout 3/4 cup, enough for four. It belongs with boiled or poached fish, boiled mutton or leg of lamb, and boiled fowl -- the same places caper sauce goes.
Nasturtiums earned their place in the kitchen garden twice over: the flowers and leaves went into salads, and the unripe seed pods, pickled in vinegar, stood in for capers, which had to be imported from the Mediterranean and cost accordingly. English gardening and cookery writers were recommending the substitution by the eighteenth century, and it crossed to American households along with the plant, which grows easily and prolifically in a Southern summer. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housewives -- hence the "Mrs. S. T." -- and its brevity here is typical: the book assumes any reader already knows how to draw butter and needs telling only what to put in it. A sauce like this is a good index of the period's economy, taking a decorative garden annual and turning it into the flavoring for boiled mutton.