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Imitation Caper Sauce
Cut cucumber pickles into tiny cubes of a uniform size. Drain perfectly dry and stir into hot drawn butter. Boil for one minute. Eat with fish or chops.
A three-line sauce that depends entirely on knowing what "drawn butter" meant in 1911 — not simply melted butter, but a light flour-thickened butter sauce.
- Drawn butter, definedIn American books of this period drawn butter usually means a flour-thickened butter sauce rather than plain melted butter: roughly equal spoonfuls of butter and flour cooked together, then whisked with about a cup of hot water or light stock and finished with another lump of butter off the heat. Proportions vary from book to book. Plain melted butter will carry the pickle cubes less well.
- The pickles"Cucumber pickles" here most likely means sour or dill-type pickles in brine rather than sweet bread-and-butter slices; sweet pickles would make the sauce cloying and slightly syrupy.
- Why drain "perfectly dry"This is the hinge. Cucumber brine is both watery and acidic; undrained cubes thin the sauce and can make it separate. Blot the dice on a towel before they go in.
- The one-minute boilLong enough to heat the pickles through and cook off surface moisture, short enough that they keep some crunch. Left boiling longer they go limp.
- Uniform diceThe instruction is not fussiness — the sauce is meant to read as caper sauce at a glance, and capers of a given grade are fairly even in size. Aim for pieces about 1/8 inch.
- QuantityNo amounts are given. A generous 1/4 cup of drained dice to a cup of drawn butter sauce is about right, and that cup serves four.
- SeasoningTaste at the end. The brine on the pickles carries salt and acid unevenly, so salt only after the pickles are in, and add a squeeze of lemon if it needs lift.
Caper sauce — drawn butter studded with the pickled flower buds of Capparis spinosa — was the standard English accompaniment to boiled mutton, and it crossed to American tables along with the boiled leg of lamb. Capers were an imported specialty, sold in small bottles and priced accordingly, so cooks improvised: chopped pickled cucumber, nasturtium seeds and green pickled elder buds all appear in nineteenth-century books as caper substitutes. Its presence in a Butterick book is telling. Butterick sold dress patterns, and its cookbook was aimed at the same practical household — a place where a sauce might be wanted for fish or chops on a weeknight and the bottle of capers was simply not in the cupboard.