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Caper Sauce (for Fish)
INGREDIENTS for 1 tureen. pint of melted butter, 3 dessertspoonfuls of capers, 1 dessertspoonful of their liquor, a small piece of glaze, if at hand (this may be dispensed with), 1/4 teaspoonful of salt, ditto of pepper, 1 tablespoonful of anchovy essence. AVERAGE COST, 6d.
Cut the capers across once or twice, but do not chop them fine; put them in a saucepan with pint of good melted butter, and add all the other ingredients.
Keep stirring the whole until it just simmers, when it is ready to serve.
THE CAPER.
TIME.-1 minute to simmer.
CAPER SAUCE.
A Victorian melted-butter sauce built for boiled or poached white fish, salmon, or boiled mutton. It comes together in about five minutes once the butter sauce base is made.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not butterIn Victorian usage melted butter means a flour-thickened butter sauce, made by cooking butter and flour together and then whisking in water or fish cooking liquor until smooth. Proportions vary from book to book; simply melting butter in a pan gives an entirely different, and much thinner, result.
- Quantity of the butter sauceThe ingredient list has lost the fraction before "pint" in both places. Three dessertspoonfuls of capers and one tablespoon of anchovy essence suit about half a pint (roughly 1 cup / 285 ml) of sauce; a full pint would taste flat.
- DessertspoonfulA dessertspoon is between a teaspoon and a tablespoon, about 2 teaspoons or 10 ml. Three of them is about 2 tablespoons of capers.
- GlazeMeat or fish glaze here means stock reduced to a sticky syrup. A teaspoon of a good concentrated stock paste or reduced fish fumet stands in; the recipe itself says it can be left out.
- Anchovy essenceA thin, salty anchovy extract sold bottled in the period. Anchovy paste thinned with a little water, or a scant teaspoon of good fish sauce, gives the same background savour. Taste before adding the salt, since essence, capers and caper liquor all bring their own.
- Do not let it boilThe sauce is brought only to the point of simmering; the recipe says 'until it just simmers' and allows one minute. A butter sauce held at a boil risks separating. One minute of gentle heat, stirring, is all it needs.
- Cut, not choppedThe recipe says to cut the capers across once or twice but not to chop them fine, so they stay recognisable in the finished sauce. It does not say why.
- YieldHalf a pint of sauce would serve roughly four to six with fish; the original's 'INGREDIENTS for 1 tureen' is the book's standard way of stating yield for a sauce.
Capers are the pickled flower buds of Capparis spinosa, a Mediterranean shrub, and they reached British kitchens as an imported store-cupboard pickle rather than a fresh ingredient. Nineteenth-century cookery books treat them as a pantry staple to be kept on hand alongside anchovy essence and mushroom ketchup. Caper sauce is most firmly associated with boiled leg of mutton, but Mrs Beeton's household books give a separate fish version, weighted with anchovy and a little glaze, since boiled turbot, cod and salmon were everyday dinner-table fare and needed something acid to cut them. The "average cost, 6d." line is characteristic of the Beeton style, which priced every dish so a mistress could budget a week of meals at a glance.