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Caper Sauce
few grains cayenne 1½ cups boiling water cup capers 1 tablespoon butter Melt the two tablespoons butter, add flour, seasonings, and water. Cook ten minutes; add capers and just before serving a tablespoon butter.
The ingredient list has come down to us incomplete — the flour, salt, and the first two tablespoons of butter appear only in the method — but the sauce is a standard white roux thinned with water rather than milk, and it is easy to reconstruct.
- Missing quantitiesThe method calls for "the two tablespoons butter" and flour that never appear in the ingredient list, and it asks for unspecified "seasonings" rather than a measured salt. A conventional white sauce of this size would take roughly as much flour as butter, about 2 tablespoons, with salt to taste; the printed list is genuinely defective here rather than merely archaic.
- "Cup capers"A fraction has plainly dropped out before "cup"; ¼ or ½ cup would suit a sauce this size. A full cup of capers in 1½ cups of sauce would be a relish, not a sauce.
- Water, not milkThe sauce is a butter-and-flour base thinned with water rather than milk. Caper sauce was commonly made with the liquor from the boiled mutton or lamb it accompanied, which carries more flavour than plain water.
- The ten minutes mattersThe long simmer is not padding. It cooks the raw starch taste out of the flour and lets the sauce settle to its final thickness. Stir often and keep it at a bare bubble so the bottom does not scorch.
- Capers go in lastThey are added at the end for the same reason as the final butter: prolonged heat dulls their sharpness and turns them soft. Drain them, and add a teaspoon of their brine if the sauce needs lift.
- Finishing butterThe recipe adds the final tablespoon "just before serving"; the usual practice is to swirl it in at the last moment rather than boil it, which glosses and enriches the sauce.
- YieldAbout 1½ cups, enough for four to six servings alongside boiled lamb, mutton, or fish.
Caper sauce is the traditional English accompaniment to boiled leg of mutton, and it survives in American cookbooks of the early 1900s as one of the standard variations on drawn butter or thin white sauce — the same base, redirected by a single sharp ingredient. Capers are the pickled flower buds of Capparis spinosa, a Mediterranean shrub; in a New England kitchen of this period they arrived in bottles of vinegar brine and were valued precisely because they kept indefinitely on a shelf and cut the fat of plainly boiled meat. That Lowney's Cook Book, published by a chocolate company and best remembered for its confectionery, carries a full chapter of meat and vegetable sauces is a reminder that promotional cookbooks of the era aimed to be complete household manuals first and advertisements second.