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Caper Sauce (Add whole capers to melted)
323. Add whole capers to melted butter with a portion of the vinegar they are found in. Cream is a great improvement to the butter. A substitute for capers may be found in the nasturtium seed pickled, (see Economical Housekeeper).
Another Substitute for Caper Sauce, inferior to Nasturtiums. Boil parsley slowly, to let it become a bad colour, cut, but do not chop it fine; put it to melted butter, with a tea-spoonful of salt, and a dessertspoonful of vinegar. Boil up and serve.
A brief entry that assumes you already know how to make the sauce it builds on. Read "melted butter" as a technical term before you start.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not a puddleIn nineteenth-century British cookery this means a thickened butter sauce: roughly 1 oz butter thickened with a spoonful or two of flour, whisked into about 1/2 pint of water or milk and boiled a minute or two until it coats a spoon. Plain melted butter will not carry the capers or hold together on the plate.
- QuantitiesNone are given for the caper version. For 1/2 pint of sauce, 2 tablespoons of drained capers and 1 to 2 teaspoons of their pickling vinegar is a reasonable starting proportion; add the vinegar at the end and taste, since caper brines vary widely in strength.
- Capers whole, not choppedThe instruction to add them whole is deliberate. Chopped capers cloud the sauce and give a uniform sourness; whole buds stay distinct and burst against the mutton.
- CreamA few tablespoons stirred in at the end, off the boil. Once the cream and the caper vinegar are both in, do not let the sauce boil hard or the acid may cause it to separate.
- Pickled nasturtium seedsThe green seed pods of Tropaeolum majus, pickled in spiced vinegar, were a standard garden substitute and are still worth making if you grow nasturtiums. Use them exactly as capers, brine and all.
- The parsley versionDeliberately overcooked parsley is a period trick to dull the green and soften the leaf so it reads as a caper substitute rather than as parsley sauce. Boil it 8 to 10 minutes, drain well, then cut coarsely with a knife rather than mincing.
- Salt in the substituteA full teaspoon of salt is a lot for half a pint of sauce. With modern salted butter, start with a quarter teaspoon and adjust.
- Yield and servingHalf a pint serves four to six. Caper sauce belongs with boiled leg of mutton or lamb, and also suits boiled fish or a boiled fowl.
Caper sauce over boiled mutton was one of the fixed points of the English dinner table, common enough that Victorian cookery books could describe it in three lines and trust the reader to fill in the rest. The capers themselves were an import, the pickled flower buds of a Mediterranean shrub, and their cost is likely part of why so many books offer garden alternatives: nasturtium seed pods, pickled while still green, were grown for this purpose in kitchen gardens and were often held to be the closest thing to the real bud. The parsley version, frankly labelled inferior here, shows the logic of substitution running out of rope, since it imitates only the flecked appearance and the vinegar sharpness. Cross-references of this kind are common in period compilations, though it is not clear here whether Economical Housekeeper is another writer's book or a companion volume by the same hand.