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Caper Sauce
To one cup of drawn butter sauce add two tablespoonfuls of capers.
A two-line derivative sauce that assumes you already know the parent. Everything hinges on what "drawn butter sauce" meant in an American kitchen around 1900.
- Drawn butter is not clarified butterIn American cookbooks of this period, drawn butter sauce is a light flour-thickened butter sauce: roughly 2 tablespoons butter cooked with 1 to 1 1/2 tablespoons flour, then a cup of hot water or light stock whisked in and simmered until smooth, with more butter beaten in off the heat. If you read "drawn butter" in the looser British sense of plain melted butter, the sauce is likely to separate rather than hold together.
- Add the capers at the endStir them in off the heat, once the sauce has stopped simmering. Prolonged cooking dulls their sharpness and can turn the sauce faintly bitter, and the point of the sauce is the contrast of the brine against the butter.
- Capers and their liquidTwo tablespoons means drained capers, not two tablespoons scooped with brine. Nonpareils are small enough to leave whole; larger capers or caperberries are worth a rough chop. A teaspoon of the brine or a squeeze of lemon added at the end sharpens a sauce that otherwise reads flat.
- Salt-packed capersIf the jar is salt-packed rather than brined, rinse and soak them 10 to 15 minutes and taste the sauce before adding any further salt. The base sauce should be seasoned lightly on the assumption the capers will bring salt with them.
- YieldAbout one cup, enough for four moderate servings poured over a sliced meat or fish.
- How it was meant to be usedHow it might be used -- A sauce of this kind is typically laid over sliced cooked meat or fish in a shallow pan and warmed through gently, or poured over slices arranged on toast. If you are reheating cooked poultry, bring it to 165F throughout, and do not let the sauce boil hard once assembled or the flour bond will thin.
Caper sauce belongs to the family of flour-and-butter sauces that anchored nineteenth-century Anglo-American cooking, where a single "drawn butter" base was varied with egg, parsley, oysters, anchovy or capers to serve a whole menu from one technique. The caper itself is the pickled flower bud of Capparis spinosa, a Mediterranean shrub; imported in brine, capers kept well on a pantry shelf and so were among the few bright, acidic seasonings available year-round to a household without much fresh produce in winter. The pairing with boiled mutton is the older and better-known one in English cookery, but a brine-sharp sauce does the same work for bland cold poultry. Recipes of this compressed kind, one sentence referring the reader back to a base preparation elsewhere in the volume, were normal in period cookbooks and assume a cook who already had the fundamentals by heart.