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Caper Sauce
To Drawn Butter Sauce add one-half cup capers drained from their liquor. Serve with boiled mutton.
Egg Sauce I To Drawn Butter Sauce add two "hard-boiled" eggs cut in one-fourth inch slices.
Two variations on a base sauce, in the terse shorthand Fannie Farmer used once a foundation had been given earlier in the chapter. Everything depends on that foundation being right.
- Drawn butter sauce is not clarified butterIn American cookbooks of this period "drawn butter" means a flour-thickened butter sauce, closer to a thin white sauce made with water rather than milk. Farmer's version is roughly 1/3 cup butter, 4 tablespoons flour, and 1 1/2 cups hot water with salt and pepper — half the butter worked into a roux, the rest beaten in at the end off the heat.
- Add the capers off the heatThe base should be finished and no longer boiling before the capers go in. Sustained heat dulls their sharpness and turns them mushy, and the acid from any clinging brine can break a butter-heavy sauce.
- Capers, drained"Drained from their liquor" means drained, not rinsed. Brined nonpareils work directly; if using salt-packed capers, soak and taste, because a half cup of them will oversalt the sauce badly.
- Season lastBetween the salted base and the salt carried in on the capers, hold back on seasoning until the capers are in.
- YieldEnough for six to eight servings alongside a joint.
- Boiled muttonMutton is rarely sold in American markets now. A boiled or braised leg or shoulder of lamb takes the sauce the same way, though lamb is milder and needs less caper to balance it.
- Egg SauceThe second paragraph is a separate recipe sharing the same base. Slice the eggs and fold them in gently at the end so the whites stay in rounds; it is traditionally served with boiled or baked fish, particularly salt cod and salmon.
Caper sauce with boiled mutton is a fixture of English cookery that passed intact into American books — the capers, the pickled flower buds of the Mediterranean Capparis spinosa, cut the fat of the joint the way mint or a sharp jelly does. Farmer's placement of it in a run of sauces built on one master preparation reflects the organizing logic of The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896): learn drawn butter sauce properly and you have caper, egg and lobster variants for the cost of a sentence each. The reliance on water rather than milk or stock also marks these as everyday sauces.